HDD GURU FORUMS

Hey Guys,

Currently I have a 1GB disk on my table. The disk is reading fine, but it's Mac drive. Currently I have two problems with this disk. First of all, I tried to just take a target HDD and write the data sector to sector to it. But the target HDD is too small. About 300 LBA are missing on the target drive (both drives are WD Passport drives with 1TB). The next thing I tried is to extract the files. This didn't work well for me. The drive is a HFS+ drive. And on the drive I have a TimeMachine backup and two "strange" folders. ".HFS Private Directory Data_" and "HFS+ Private Data". In the first "hidden" dot Folder I have 100.000 sub folders like "dir_1000000" and in this folders are the actual files. When I extract the files with PC-3000, I have about 1,2TB of Data, just in this one folder. And the other data was about 400GB. So something is wrong, my guess is, that some Unix file links are extracted into real data. So what can I do?

My current idea is to image the data into a single binary file, to mount it on a native Mac or Linux device and to copy the data. But with PC-3000 I only can create binary Image files of 2GB chunks. So I have to glue it together again.

Does anyone have a better idea?

I would make a clone with DE to a larger drive, if needed can set max LBA to match patient.
After that copy data on a Mac.

DE can export image to a single file, no problem. But i would prefer a drive

Ok, I was able to dump everything into a file with DE. And the normal files I was able to copy with rsync on a Mac. But I can't back up the TimeMachine. With rsync I was able to copy just one file per minute.

Code:

sh-3.2# find Backups.backupdb/ -type f | wc -l

54369102

=> 100 Years!?!
And with the MacOS Drag&Drop Copy? After 1,5 Days of "preparing" to copy I got the message, that there is not enough free space on the target drive and another 9.4TB are needed. I think, next I'm going to try to copy everything just with cp on shell, but I don't think, this is also going to work ;(

Moving a TimeBackup should only be done using MacOS's own built-in function as described here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202380

It also should be copied before any other data to the destination (trust me, you'll regret it if you try it the other way around)

Because of the versioning used in TimeBackup, trying to copy/recover it any other way can easily result in 20Tb coming off a 500Gb disk.

Personally, I charge extra if they want a TimeBackup recovered since it often results in a lot more work. Most people just decline the extra charge and decide to redo the backup. Saves me time, saves them money, win-win.

Looks like you are cloning backup folders from TimeMachine. They have HardLinks and you have been cloning a lot of hardlinks several times. DE recognizes hardlinks as different items and creates separate maps for each one. You can check by yourself that all backup folders have very-very similar data... If you don't have 10 TB drive then you can either save the backup with the latest timestump or wait for the pc3000 update (perhaps, this bug would be fixed in new version).

data-medics wrote:Moving a TimeBackup should only be done using MacOS's own built-in function as described here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202380

Seems like Apple built a special function to copy a TM-Backup into their finder. Because I tried to copy the TM-Files with PathFinder and it didn't work for me (I got the message with the 9TB of needed space.)

data-medics wrote:It also should be copied before any other data to the destination (trust me, you'll regret it if you try it the other way around)

Thank you for the hint!

data-medics wrote:Because of the versioning used in TimeBackup, trying to copy/recover it any other way can easily result in 20Tb coming off a 500Gb disk.

Apple is using Hard Links on their TM Backups. Hard Links are normally not a problem on a Unix based system. rsync and cp are able to handle it. I don't understand why there was a problem on OS X / HFS+ with them.

data-medics wrote:Personally, I charge extra if they want a TimeBackup recovered since it often results in a lot more work. Most people just decline the extra charge and decide to redo the backup. Saves me time, saves them money, win-win.

The first priority of the client was to get the TM Backups back, everything else is "bonus". Why? I have no idea.

For TM backups, I usually get the best clone possible, fix the file system on the clone so it is mountable, then use the apple disk utility to do a partition copy.

lcoughey wrote:For TM backups, I usually get the best clone possible, fix the file system on the clone so it is mountable, then use the apple disk utility to do a partition copy.

Yes, I think that's the best way. But I don't know why, the 1TB WD Passport Patient drive was about 200 LBA larger then the 1TB target drive. So the content didn't fit to it. I have no idea, why that was the case. My idea was just to make a 1 to 1 image, but it didn't work out.

data-medics wrote:Moving a TimeBackup should only be done via OSX built-in function: https://goo.gl/ZzZKjp
...charge extra doing so.

The instructions suggest:
- Format drive as GUID || HFS+ Journaled
- First item copied to drive | Copy specifically to root


TimeMachine's HIGHLY compressed (as 'Data Medics' stated).
I've wondered if TimeMachine compresses the B-Tree ala dedup so multiple iterations of a file are 'spoofed' in the B-Tree to rep. a full image to backup from without consuming more space.

If a client doesn't need anything older than what's currently on their system, I prefer to just take their last backup (from their TimeMachine) and save it as a Sparse Bundle ... or even save the entire drive as a Sparse Bundle via CCC.

All versions of Disk Utility after Yosemite (10.10.x) TRULY suck. - - Unreliable
- Fails cloning drives
- Fails making partitions or makes unwanted partitions.

I prefer CCC these days.

Docks instead of external devices
- Buy drives based on trustworthy model numbers
- Switch connectors easily
- Warranty doesn't force choosing between enclosure or data.

And -- want to see if I can get APFS/High Sierra loaded via ESXi ... just for the sake of.


Did I mention ??
ALLLL ver. Disk Utility post Yosemite (10.10.x) suck suck suck suck suck suck suck ..... echo echo echo ...

barring ESXi working,
I'd settle outta court for a 10.10 vm within 10.13.