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Time Machine anomaly

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  Time Machine anomaly pfjames2000@googlemail.com (Peter James) - 2015-02-12 11:22 +0000
    Re: Time Machine anomaly Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> - 2015-02-12 10:28 -0500
      Re: Time Machine anomaly Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2015-02-13 09:20 +1300
    Re: Time Machine anomaly Bruce Horrocks <07.013@scorecrow.com> - 2015-02-12 20:54 +0000
    Re: Time Machine anomaly {$PW$}@womar.co.uk (Paul Womar) - 2015-02-12 22:10 +0000
    Re: Time Machine anomaly "John Varela" <newlamps@verizon.net> - 2015-02-13 02:23 +0000
    Re: Time Machine anomaly David Arnstein <arnstein+usenet@pobox.com> - 2015-03-04 00:09 +0000

#69725 — Time Machine anomaly

To recap.  The file structure of my iMac became corrupted and I had to
delete the contents of the hard disk using disk utilities and restore
from Time Machine.  Time Machine is set to backup every hour and every
day.

When I came to restore from Time Machine I found to my horror that the
last backup I could restore was the 28th of Ocotber 2102.  Thus I lost
two and a half years backups.  I was mortified.

I restored to that date and then explored Time Machine.  TM prefs showed
it was set to hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for
the past month, and weekly backups for all  previous months.  And that
the latest backup available to me was the 28th of October 2012.

However, clicking on the icon for TM on my desktop I am able to examine
backups from today until back to 28 October 2012, and yet I can't
restore them.

I can't be too sure on this point, but round about October 2012 my
Seagate hard disk was replaced by Apple under a general  warranty even
though the computer was three years of age.  Some sort of problem with
Seagate HD's I understand. 

The other oddity is that although my TM external disk shows up in
DiskUtilities there is no way that I can run diagnostic checks on the
external disk.

I would be most grateful for any advice or help anyone can give me on
this problem.

Peter

-- 

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#69735

In article <1lzq9m8.dlnueq1oewdtcN%pfjames2000@googlemail.com>,
 pfjames2000@googlemail.com (Peter James) wrote:

> To recap.  The file structure of my iMac became corrupted and I had to
> delete the contents of the hard disk using disk utilities and restore
> from Time Machine.  Time Machine is set to backup every hour and every
> day.
> 
> When I came to restore from Time Machine I found to my horror that the
> last backup I could restore was the 28th of Ocotber 2102.  Thus I lost
> two and a half years backups.  I was mortified.

That's a *real* time machine -- it lets you go almost a century into the 
future!

-- 
Barry Margolin
Arlington, MA

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#69741

In article <barmar-EF405F.10284112022015@88-209-239-213.giganet.hu>,
Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> In article <1lzq9m8.dlnueq1oewdtcN%pfjames2000@googlemail.com>,
>  pfjames2000@googlemail.com (Peter James) wrote:
> >
> > To recap.  The file structure of my iMac became corrupted and I had to
> > delete the contents of the hard disk using disk utilities and restore
> > from Time Machine.  Time Machine is set to backup every hour and every
> > day.
> > 
> > When I came to restore from Time Machine I found to my horror that the
> > last backup I could restore was the 28th of Ocotber 2102.  Thus I lost
> > two and a half years backups.  I was mortified.
> 
> That's a *real* time machine -- it lets you go almost a century into the 
> future!

That would be great ... get a "last minute" job that needs to be done
urgently (and then usually sits on someone else's desk for days) ...
simply load up Time Machine, scroll forward and retrieve the finished
files from the future. Hopefully Apple is already working on this!  ;-)

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#69742

I haven't had this problem so just some general suggestions...

On 12/02/2015 11:22, Peter James wrote:
> To recap.  The file structure of my iMac became corrupted and I had to
> delete the contents of the hard disk using disk utilities and restore
> from Time Machine.  Time Machine is set to backup every hour and every
> day.
>
> When I came to restore from Time Machine I found to my horror that the
> last backup I could restore was the 28th of Ocotber 2102.  Thus I lost
> two and a half years backups.  I was mortified.
>
> I restored to that date and then explored Time Machine.  TM prefs showed

Firstly, stop using the TM backup drive except for attempting to restore 
from it: you don't want a fresh run of TM to overwrite anything. Use a 
new hard drive for your new backups from now on.

> it was set to hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for
> the past month, and weekly backups for all  previous months.  And that
> the latest backup available to me was the 28th of October 2012.
>
> However, clicking on the icon for TM on my desktop I am able to examine
> backups from today until back to 28 October 2012, and yet I can't
> restore them.

Sounds like part of the disk is corrupted, but that the index is okay.

When your normal drive got corrupted - do you know why? E.g. did the 
disk fail? The reason for asking is that if the main drive was corrupted 
by something, and you know not what, then your TM backup drive may also 
have been corrupted since it was connected at the time.

> I can't be too sure on this point, but round about October 2012 my
> Seagate hard disk was replaced by Apple under a general  warranty even
> though the computer was three years of age.  Some sort of problem with
> Seagate HD's I understand.

Seems unlikely to be related, but I can't rule it out. I would have 
thought that if TM was going to throw a wobbly about the changed drive 
then it would have done so at the time.

> The other oddity is that although my TM external disk shows up in
> DiskUtilities there is no way that I can run diagnostic checks on the
> external disk.

Is the Verify Disk button missing / greyed out or does it not run to 
completion? If the latter, then it sounds like a fairly major problem 
with the drive. Contacting a specialist recovery company is probably the 
next step.

> I would be most grateful for any advice or help anyone can give me on
> this problem.

A long shot but... there's a free disk / file analysis program called 
Grand Perspective which primarily shows you which files/folders are 
taking up all the space.
<http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net>

However, it has an option to compare backups side-by-side so you can see 
what has changed. This may shed light on what is happening with your 
backup. The help page for this functionality is at the link below.
<http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/HelpDocumentation/HowToAnalyseTimeMachineBackups.html>

HTH
-- 
Bruce Horrocks
Surrey
England
(bruce at scorecrow dot com)

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#69746

Peter James <pfjames2000@googlemail.com> wrote:

> However, clicking on the icon for TM on my desktop I am able to examine
> backups from today until back to 28 October 2012, and yet I can't
> restore them.

The Time Machine GUI is supposed to make things easier but I've had
issues with it just hang for ages and so restored things by hand
instead.  

So if you can see the data in the finder at this stage I'd say you have
very little to lose by restoring the info yourself, i.e. get drag n
dropping the info where it needs to be.  For the most part I'd think
geting your applications folder and your user folder will have you 99%
of the way there if the real data is in the backup.  If you've not done
so already, probably worth trying to open a few files directly from the
TM drive that you know were only in recent backups to confirm the data
is really there.

To restore your user folder it's probably easiest that you create a new
admin user with a new different name, log on with that one and then copy
your user folder from the backup and overwrite the existing one (or
ideally rename the old one as a precaution if you have space for both).
-- 
-> The email address used in this message *IS* valid <-

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#69752

On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 11:22:38 UTC, pfjames2000@googlemail.com (Peter 
James) wrote:

> To recap.  The file structure of my iMac became corrupted and I had to
> delete the contents of the hard disk using disk utilities and restore
> from Time Machine.  Time Machine is set to backup every hour and every
> day.
> 
> When I came to restore from Time Machine I found to my horror that the
> last backup I could restore was the 28th of Ocotber 2102.  Thus I lost
> two and a half years backups.  I was mortified.
> 
> I restored to that date and then explored Time Machine.  TM prefs showed
> it was set to hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for
> the past month, and weekly backups for all  previous months.  And that
> the latest backup available to me was the 28th of October 2012.
> 
> However, clicking on the icon for TM on my desktop I am able to examine
> backups from today until back to 28 October 2012, and yet I can't
> restore them.

Are you sure? I had the opposite experience a couple of months ago. 
I wanted to seek out the earliest possible version of a particular 
file. Time Machine presented dates back to December 2012. I could 
not, however, open files before some date in 2014. I think (didn't 
bother to check) that date may have been when I moved TM from a 2TB 
to a 4TB drive. (I was able to go into TM with the Finder and fetch 
the file I wanted.)

Some time later I went into TM and discovered that now TM could 
access the files all the way back to 2012. I just checked and that's
still true. I have no idea what that was all about, but if you can 
see the recent files in Finder it might be worth your while to retry
restoring from TM. (If, that is, there's a way to bypass the most 
recent TM files. Maybe someone could help with that. Would simply 
deleting all the recent files work or would it destroy the file 
system?)

Just be sure to make one or two clone backups before you mess with 
it.
 
> I can't be too sure on this point, but round about October 2012 my
> Seagate hard disk was replaced by Apple under a general  warranty even
> though the computer was three years of age.  Some sort of problem with
> Seagate HD's I understand. 
> 
> The other oddity is that although my TM external disk shows up in
> DiskUtilities there is no way that I can run diagnostic checks on the
> external disk.
> 
> I would be most grateful for any advice or help anyone can give me on
> this problem.

-- 
John Varela

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#70420

Have you tried browsing your backup disk using Finder?

On your backup disk, you will find a folder named 
	backup/<machine name>
where <machine name> is the name of your Mac.

My theory is that you have two folders instead of one. The split occurred
when you replaced your MAIN disk drive or changed the name of your Mac.
-- 
David Arnstein                       (00)
arnstein+usenet@pobox.com          {{   }}
                                     ^^

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