WARNING:Leopard Time Machine Files 'Lost in Space', Data locked in Black Hole, can l get it back by ...Internet Marketing Resource Notes:
Mac Leopard Time Machine, my recent experience with my all so trusted app.Anth, you gotta make the time to do a full report about this, as there's a bit of detail. Just jot down the most important things here.
* With Time Machine, have a 'Big hard drive for the backups' ...
that was my main thought, my main consideration was about having a big hard drive for the back ups. What l didn't consider as time went on and the backup became larger was,
HOW BIG MY SYSTEM DRIVE SHOULD BE, my main drive that is. * Make sure you have a fair amount of extra space on your main drive. If you do have to do a restore and make the mistake l did ( l tried to restore my whole drive after a hang, of
apx 30
gb)
Back to the
begining.
I hadn't turned my machine off for some 8-9 days but l like to reboot it occasionally, so l did.
It restarted with the good
ol earth logo, oh no. So l ended up restarting, all good BUT it somehow reverted to some 6 weeks prior, I just lost 6 weeks of data,
aaaaagh. No To
WOrry gGood Ol Trusty Time Machine to the rescue.
Problem was when TM went
thru its paces it said l needed 29
gb to do a restore. Not realizing there was only 22
gb free (long story, I use this as a test machine as I just moved to mac 10 months ago so bought a small drive,
macmini with 300
gb data
usb drive and 500
gb usb Time Machine Backup drive)
But l already pushed the OK so it was already backing up,
hhmmmm, this is a problem.
So l furiously started to move files off the main drive to make more space, it was a Race....
see l didn't realize all this till it had some 5
gb left (The process did not warn me there would not be enough space, it just said that l needed 29
gb) so at 5
gb of drive space left here l am moving deleting panicking....
then a thought comes to mind, I know in Windows, once you have a small amount of space left on the operating system drive 'watch out' .... see the problem was, l was moving and deleting files, but mac master was not freeing any of the space up, don't know why... and it was using up space quicker than l could delete it...
it's coming, my thoughts were clear, not knowing how TM would react to such adverse situation. Did the design such a event in mind,,,, The vision was really getting clear, days of data retrieval coming my way.
DID THEY DESIGN THIS AROUND A
NOOB LIKE ME WHOSE DELETING DATA AS ITS RESTORING...
ohh l forgot, really you 'd think it should have told me there was not going to be enough space, darn whats all that processing power for then, the machinery is more than capable of reporting such matters.
So eventually it warns 'Not Enough Drive Space' to continue abort abort abort, so it stops, from memory it asked me to delete stuff and make space. Hello, l just deleted 15
gb as it was going but it didn't release it.
Now for the
Bazar yet cool thing l suppose, my data was 'Time Warped' yeah really 'Time Warped' my data was stuck in two dimensions. On the
macmini desktop and through finder was my data as it was some 6 weeks ago, YET when l accessed this mac from my other
macbook all it could see was my data as it was the day before.... this is getting to be a long story.
I will finish it in a another post.
The short ending is, went bought a 1
tb drive and spent days reconfiguring everything, cloning the data that was missing 6 weeks to a larger drive for my main system. This was my existing 300
gb. Then tried many ways to use the time machine system to restore from backups, from just plugging it in to booting from
cds. This had stopped in between a backup so l couldn't get it to work even after plugging it back in and letting it do a current backup to itself.
To really test TM out, l even tried to access my original TM data through another TM data store l created. waaahhh, l know. Let me explain. After installing and cloning the new drive, a usb external drive, naturally l backed it up with TM. once l did that l connected my old TM drive, so now there were two TM drives connected at once. So then l went into TM mode on the new data set and accessed the drive with the other TM data and ....... it actually saw the data ok , but only had one restore date which was of no use, oh well worth a try. That was my last option until my next one, as u can read below.
WHAT I DID FIND, ALTHOUGH SLOW & PAINFUL, was
l could just access the data in the TM archive and manually copy the data out, the short of a bad story is, Time Machine did actually save my data albeit in a strange fashion, being fairly new to mac's and TM this maybe was apples way of dummy proofing Leopard.
So
l'm back up and running with much more space all round, UNTIL NEXT TIME 'Time Machine!'
If any such or similar things happen to you there are lots of cool people online who have written much about the normal way of fixing similar issues, one is just installing your Leopard Disc and then doing a restore l think from Disk Utilities, search on those words.
Man one experience worth having for the experience but never want to repeat.
signing off at 3.37am ...