Time Machine Drive Failure - Convert Backups.backupdb to backupbundle?

[sonnenhund]

I recently had the drive I was using over the Network for Time Machine fail.

Now that I have a new drive, is there a way to create an initial backup with Time Machine over USB to the new drive, which backs up to `Backups.backupdb`, then convert that into a `backupbundle` file that Time Machine uses for subsequent backups over the network?

I really would like to avoid copying ~1TB over the network if I could...

(Also I asked on Think Different if you'd prefer to answer there for Magic Internet Points.)

Cheers!

 

[lederermc]

My experience tells me that sparse bundling is kind of a slow process. So if you do a TM into a directory then convert to sparse bundle it's slow. However, if you're interested in trying this it might still fail: Start a TM on the remote machine, then cancel cleanly after it has backed up a GB or so. then move drive to local and mount the sparse bundle so it looks like an external drive. then select it and complete TM 1st backup. Pray. then move it back to remote. On local remove the "external" and add the remote drive to TM. Pray again.

 

[sonnenhund]

Thanks @lederermc, this was something I did try but to no avail - Catalina (I guess it's Catalina) now creates backupbundle files which I was not able to mount. I was able to get inside the file and navigate its structure but there was nothing resembling the structure found in Backups.backupdb, which mostly looked like the regular OS X file structure.

To keep this from happening again, my future probably holds both of these:

1. Switch my network mounted drive to a RAID-1 with at least two mirrored drives, vastly reducing the odds of a total loss;
2. Start using a cloud backup solution (like BackBlaze or Carbonite or the like).

Cheers!

 

[lederermc]

Thanks @lederermc, this was something I did try but to no avail - Catalina (I guess it's Catalina) now creates backupbundle files which I was not able to mount. I was able to get inside the file and navigate its structure but there was nothing resembling the structure found in Backups.backupdb, which mostly looked like the regular OS X file structure.

To keep this from happening again, my future probably holds both of these:

1. Switch my network mounted drive to a RAID-1 with at least two mirrored drives, vastly reducing the odds of a total loss;
2. Start using a cloud backup solution (like BackBlaze or Carbonite or the like).

Cheers!

Instead of Raid I use two network drives and allow TM to ping-pong between the two. One is on a NAS in a physically separated area of my house. I also have my desktop docs in iCloud.

 

[Weaselboy]

Now that I have a new drive, is there a way to create an initial backup with Time Machine over USB to the new drive, which backs up to `Backups.backupdb`, then convert that into a `backupbundle` file that Time Machine uses for subsequent backups over the network?

TITAN777 : BEST Link For Login Active Alternatif For You

Link login adalah hal yang sangat penting untuk menuju kemenangan maxwin x 500 hari ini

oldtoad.net

Scroll down to section 3. at this link and it will walk you through how to make a USB TM backup, then transfer that to the Time Capsule.

 

[sonnenhund]

TITAN777 : BEST Link For Login Active Alternatif For You

Link login adalah hal yang sangat penting untuk menuju kemenangan maxwin x 500 hari ini

oldtoad.net

Scroll down to section 3. at this link and it will walk you through how to make a USB TM backup, then transfer that to the Time Capsule.

View attachment 946353

@Weaselboy, I believe that is out-of-date for Catalina. Time Machine now creates backupbundle files, not sparsebundle - and these are quite different. backupbundle files are not mountable, but can be opened. And inside them I could not find a Backups.backupdb file anywhere. So I ended up having to do the full ~950GB over the network anyway...

 

[Weaselboy]

@Weaselboy, I believe that is out-of-date for Catalina. Time Machine now creates backupbundle files, not sparsebundle - and these are quite different. backupbundle files are not mountable, but can be opened. And inside them I could not find a Backups.backupdb file anywhere. So I ended up having to do the full ~950GB over the network anyway...

Interesting.... first I have heard that. Thanks

 

[Taz Mangus]

@Weaselboy, I believe that is out-of-date for Catalina. Time Machine now creates backupbundle files, not sparsebundle - and these are quite different. backupbundle files are not mountable, but can be opened. And inside them I could not find a Backups.backupdb file anywhere. So I ended up having to do the full ~950GB over the network anyway...

The backupbundle file is actually a sparsebundle file. On one of my Time Machine backup drives I have a backupbundle file which was a Time Machine network backup. I added the extension .sparsebundle, it became mountable and I was able to access the Backups.backupd folder inside.

 

[lederermc]

One last comment about Time Machine. It's too slow and error prone. I have about 3 GB of personal stuff which is in iCloud and about 3TB of other stuff like movies, lossless music home videos of kiddos etc. I don't trust TM with this 3TB data store and I really don't need hourly backups of it. Therefore, I back up this 3TB to a disk formatted APFS using rsync with "--delete" with a launch daemon set for 01:15 every night. I do a dry run 1st to see if there are any deletes. If there are, I copy-clone (cp -Rpc source target) the source directory to a unique new directory based on the current date_time. These clones take up about 100 MB of space and take 1 minute or two to perform. Then I do the actual rsync --delete command. This way the files that are deleted by the rsync are preserved in the clone and each of these clone directories are full back-ups at the time of the clone. Once a year or so I'll delete the old clones. I like having complete control over what get's backed up (no .DS_Store or trashes etc) and how often they occur and the easy of managing an analyzing the backups. It's all in a very simple bash script.