Re: Repairing a time machine sparsebundle

SuperDuper's free trial only does normal copies and file updates from one drive to another. So it's like a gui on top of rsync.

Disk Warrior might do what I want -- it claims to -- but at $120, non-refundable, it's out what I'm willing to pay.

Super Duper's website makes no claims about being able to restore dead drives, or fix catalog errors, etc. So I'm looking at a .sparsebundle, that is fully readable (bands, etc), containing a broken file system that fsck/disk utility cannot fix, and cannot even attach -readonly.

And I'm looking at hfs+ and thinking "unix's file system never got into this bad of a problem, even if you wound up with hundreds of directories in lost+found without any hirearchy, and usually would mount readonly in the worst cases."

In fact, just in case there was some issue with the non-fixableness being related to being a time machine non-writable image somehow, I tried doing it with shadow.

bash-3.2# hdiutil attach -nomount -shadow ~/tmp/shadow2.hdiutil TimeMachine.sparsebundle/
/dev/disk9              GUID_partition_scheme           
/dev/disk9s1            EFI                             
/dev/disk9s2            Apple_HFS                       
bash-3.2# diskutil repairVolume disk9s2
Started file system repair on disk9s2 TimeMachine
Checking file system
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Detected a case-sensitive volume
Checking extents overflow file
Checking catalog file
Invalid sibling link
Rebuilding catalog B-tree
The volume TimeMachine could not be repaired
Volume repair complete
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required
Error: -69845: File system verify or repair failed
Underlying error: 8: POSIX reports: Exec format error
bash-3.2# 

Looks like it's a simple case of "$120 to recover is more than I can afford/value the recovery".

On 2020-01-23, at 4:23 PM, Macs R We <[email protected]> wrote:

> Looks like my information was old. Version 4 couldn't do it (even after they claimed it would); version 5 apparently handles it well. Guess I stopped trying it after version 4 yelled at me.
> 
> Another source says: 
> 
>> SuperDuper will make a file-level copy, handling multi-linked files correctly, and will produce a copy without catalog damage even if the source has catalog damage. (But if the source catalog is damaged, the copy may not finish, and even if it finishes the new copy may have other non-catalog inconsistencies that make it unusable.)
> 
> You may want to try that, especially since I think it has a free trial.
> 
> 
>> On Jan 23, 2020, at 4:21 PM, Matt Penna <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> I’m curious about this because DiskWarrior works fine for me on Time Machine volumes (but I’ve never tried it on a Time Machine sparsebundle).
>> 
>> The only trouble I had with DiskWarrior on Time Machine drives was when it was a 32-bit app and could not allocate enough memory to hold all the file system structures—a showstopper with my Time Machine drive that at the time had a 17GB B-tree and that definitely would not fit into the 4GB 32-bit RAM limit.
>> 
>> Since going 64-bit in late 2014, DiskWarrior should work on all Time Machine volumes.
>> 
>> In an ironic reversal with modern Macs, DiskWarrior can now ONLY work on Time Machine drives; APFS-formatted drives drives are not supported with current versions of DiskWarrior and Time Machine drives are still HFS+. (Alsoft says DiskWarrior APFS support is coming soon, now that technical specs for the file system have been finalized, though APFS is ostensibly robust enough to not need much fixing. I know, I know…)
>> 
>> 	Matt
>> 
>>> On Jan 23, 2020, at 1:39 PM, Macs R We <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Although all of this is true, as it turns out, I know of only one disk management tool that will even attempt to repair a Time Machine volume, because the volume architecture is so baroque -- and that is Disk Utility. If you try to repair the volume with Disk Warrior, it will flat out tell you, "this is a Time Machine volume, and I don't do those." You have to use only Disk Utility, not fsck. If DU can't solve the problem, it can't be solved.
>>> 
>>>> On Jan 23, 2020, at 11:31 AM, Matt Penna <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On Jan 23, 2020, at 1:25 PM, Michael <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 2020-01-23, at 10:23 AM, Matt Penna <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> If you have DiskWarrior, I would give that a try. I believe it works on disk images and sparsebundles.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>  Matt
>>>>> 
>>>>> I do not have disk warrior.
>>>> 
>>>> Unfortunately, whenever a drive or image is not reparable like this, I’ve always had to resort to a 3rd-party tool to fix the file system; the built-in tools are not very robust. Perhaps someone else will have another suggestion.
>>>> 
>>>> It’s always been baffling to me that 3rd parties write better fix-it tools than the people who write the OSes. This has been a problem for over 30 years and it’s still as unsolved as ever, even if the file systems are a lot less fragile than they used to be.
>>>> 
>>>>  Matt
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