Fix Your Desktop

Recently after switching from Mac OS X to Debian, I found I needed to restore a couple files from the Time Machine backup that I kept. The drive works just fine as an HFS+ mount, but I couldn’t figure out how to retrieve anything within. When Google didn’t yield the answer, I began to explore on my own.

It turns out Apple does a couple slick things with the file system to make incremental backups work, including hard linking to directories, which isn't allowed in Linux. So for anyone that needs to access their Time Machine from something other than its associated Mac, here’s how you do it...

[robg adds: The following details were reproduced (with minor editing) using the author's original blog post, with his permission.]

1. Mount the drive. On linux, it should automount if you have gnome-volume-manager installed. If you don’t see it in /media, then run nautilus and check the deskt...

   

   

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