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jackotack

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 26, 2012
21
0
Context: January 2009 iMac, I upgraded Leopard to Snow Leopard and then my mac got really slow, lots of pinwheeling when ALT-Tabbing, slow boot and shutdown, etc so I 'm going for broke and will try installing Mountain Lion with a "fresh install" by erasing the drive during installation, and then I will Recover from my Time Machine backup (but deselect System files).

Right now I have two hard drives to which I have performed a TM backup (just to be double secret sure that I have all my precious photos and music safe)

I have multiple user accounts, including one which is encrypted with Filevault.
(I did the TM backups from a different account.)

I want to verify that Time Machine backed up everything correctly before I erase my internal HD.

In my TM external drive, I look in [extdrive]/Backups.backupdb/MacintoshHD.../Users folder and there is no Sparsebundle, it is just two empty folders, called user and user..

I have googled around and it looks like there should be a username.sparsebundle file in there somewhere, but I don't see it.

In fact I do not see the sparsebundle even when I browse the Users folder on my hard drive. The folders show 0kb size when I click Get Info.

I remember when I had Tiger, I could browse and I would find a user.sparseimage file and I could authenticate/mount it and browse the contents.

Now I have Snow Leopard and I do not even see the sparsebundle. I opened up Terminal and tried the "ls" command in that folder and do not see anything.

I can still log into the encrypted account, so I know the files are there.

I suspect the user is SOMEwhere but invisible???

I do not need to access the files, just to make sure they are there and I will get them back when I install Mountain Lion and then restore.

any ideas?

thanks

----------

This is what I see in my user directory

user1
user2
user3
encryptedUser (with a red do-not-enter thing on the icon)
encryptedUser.1418596585

both the last two are 0kb according to Finder
 
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