Is there any software tool for Windows that supports extracting backups.backup folders well and appropriate creates hardlinks?

I have a PC-3000, R-Studio, and UFS, but none of them seem able to re-create hardlinks (or create softlinks) unless I am missing that feature somehow. I have Paragon HFS+ so in theory I should be able to connect a HFS+ drive to windows and create hardlinsk on it.

It would really be nice to give a client ALL their backups, not just the most recent one. And making an image of the disk/managing it with Apple's native tools it not always possible.

Not at this time, if ever.

The best possible at this time is to get as sound of an image/clone as possible, see if it mounts on a Mac or Windows + MacDrive or Paragon. If not, try to fix the file system in Disk Utility or DiskWarrior.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I’m one of the developers of Hetman RAID Recovery. We have implemented support for Time Machine backups, including .sparsebundle disk images. In our testing with a Time Capsule backup, the software can open the sparsebundle, detect the APFS volume inside it, and expose the individual Time Machine backups as snapshots. Each snapshot can be browsed separately, so it is possible to access and recover files from multiple backup dates rather than being limited to the most recent backup.

We demonstrated this workflow here:
https://youtu.be/dxsZID_7zWg?t=856

One important distinction is that our test was with the newer APFS-based Time Machine format, where the backup history is represented by APFS snapshots. Your case sounds like it may involve the older HFS+ Backups.backupdb structure and its hard links/directory hard links.

I would be interested in testing Hetman Partition Recovery against your particular case. If the current implementation does not preserve or expose something you need for this workflow, we are also open to extending the software and implementing the necessary functionality.

If you are interested, I would be happy to work with you on a test case. What would help us most is a reproducible test environment — for example, an image of a Time Machine disk containing several backup generations, a .sparsebundle, or another suitable sample that demonstrates the hard-link structure and the expected result. If sharing a complete client disk image is not possible, even a small specially prepared test image containing the same structure would be sufficient.

The main thing I would like to determine is whether your requirement is:

1. to make all historical Time Machine backup versions accessible and recoverable as separate directory trees, or

2. to reconstruct the backup on another HFS+ volume while preserving the original hard-link relationships so that the result remains a structurally valid Time Machine backup.

The first scenario is already close to what we do with APFS Time Machine snapshots. The second one would be particularly interesting for us to test and, if necessary, add proper support for.

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Michael Miroshnichenko — Data Recovery Software Developer at Hetman Software
RAID • NAS • File Systems • Virtual Disks • https://hetmanrecovery.com/