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Help! Accidentally deleted time machine backup

M

macthetiger85

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 28, 2007
125
0
Baton Rouge, LA
I was having some issues with my hard drive so I reinstalled Leopard and trusted the backup to work as it should only to find that I accidentally deleted it somehow while installing Leopard. I don't know how or what happened but all I know is my time machine backups are gone and I'm starting from scratch. Good news (I think) is that the time machine backup files were on a partition on a usb hard drive (which I stopped using since.) Is there any chance of recovering anything from there or am I doomed? I heard that when you delete a file, nothing is 0'd out, it's just deleted from the file list. If so this should be quite simple right? Is this software I'm going to need or what? Thank you for any advice or help.
 
I personally like Data Rescue II. It has worked well for me on a failed hard drive before. Boomerang also gets good user reviews.

However I do not know how they would work with time machine backups you can try out their free trials and see if they list your files on that hard drive. To actually recover the files you will need to buy the one that shows your files.
 
brand said:
Ouch!! I bet you could feel your heart stop. How did you accidentally do that?
Click to expand...

Yes, indeed I did and oh my god it is so embarassing. I was trying to get rid of the iPhoto "modified" photos and just have nothing but the "originals" to save hard disk space. It's one of the things I hate about iPhoto.

Anyway, I apparently deleted everything BUT the thumbnails but stupidly seeing the thumbnails still in iPhoto as normal I went ahead and emptied the trash. My heart became a solid block of ice when I subsequently clicked on a thumbnail and got an error that the file could not be found.

The names were all messed up but FileSalvage was able to recover close to if not 100% of the photos. It saved my butt. :)
 
Get Time Capsule or make sure you keep Time Machine updated on an external HD. I feel your pain though.
Lost 20GB of music on a PC. It was a lot of CD ripping...
Thank God for :apple:
 
It shouldn't be possible to delete 8 years worth of photography. First of all, I don't know how you accidently deleted the TM back up. Secondly, TM should not have been your only back up... especially for 8 years of pictures...shame.
 
emt1 said:
It shouldn't be possible to delete 8 years worth of photography. First of all, I don't know how you accidently deleted the TM back up. Secondly, TM should not have been your only back up... especially for 8 years of pictures...shame.
Click to expand...

I fully deserve that because it was a ridiculously stupid blunder. I still don't even remember how I did it myself exactly. As I recall I just deleted the wrong directory.

I use Time Machine now and I am much more careful in my computing practices. This happened back in Tiger, before there was a Time Machine. I still should have had a backup. There is no excuse.

I agree completely though. It was a shame but fortunately I got my photos back. :eek:
 
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