Incremental Sparseimage Backup Recovery

[ddrecovery]

I have recovered a drive with sparseimage backups. The original back up was done 3 years ago and has 175 incremental backups over 3 years. This was an old external drive and the original Mac they were created on is no longer available. I can mount the individual images but all I see is the incremental data, not a complete image of the back up. Anyone know how to assemble this as a complete backup? I know you can use the Mac OSX terminal, but again from what I have read it will only mount individual images.

Any help would be appreciated.

[atomguy]

Was this a backup made with old .Mac backup tool, Time Machine, or some other third party software?

Knowing more about how the backups were created will help figure out the best way forward.

[ddrecovery]

The client thinks it was made with Time Machine, but it was set up in 2007 so he cannot really remember.

[atomguy]

As far as I know, Time Machine only generates a sparsebundle if a network drive is the backup destination. And in that case it only creates one sparseimage per machine being backed up (http://pondini.org/TM/Works3.html). Then inside is a nest of directories and hard links).

But I know I ran into a pack of incremental sparseimages helping restore from a backup way back when. I'm racking my brain trying to remember what the solution was (or what the cause was for that matter). I have a hazy memory of mounting one which triggered the rest to mount as a composite image

[ddrecovery]

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. I have tried various ways to recover it. Mounting the initial image, the last image, all the images together and just about everything in between. Choosing to restore purely copies all the directories. Worst case scenario I can open the 175 images and save off the data and merge it all, but it really will be a PITA. Keep racking the grey stuff, and thanks

[atomguy]

The only thing that has come to mind is DropDMG (http://c-command.com/dropdmg/) which I know can stitch together multi-part .dmg files, so it might have a shot at stitching together sparseimages.