Time machine on file system MS-DOS (FAT32)

[massimoimperatore]

Hello everybody,


A couple of months ago my previous Macbook Pro got stolen (still crying) and, since I never found it again, I bought another one.

My question is about Time Machine.
On that Macbook, I had "El Capitan" at the beginning and then "High Sierra" until the last moment, and on this new one I have "Mojave".

Some years ago I used my external drive as a Time Machine backup, and now I wanted to use it to recover part of the stuff I lost thanks to the thief, but my new Mac can't see it as a Time Machine drive.
I tried everything I know or found online as a guide to make Time Machine recognize the HD as a backup drive, unsuccessfully.

The external drive is an SSD, it works perfectly, I can see it in finder, no problem with it until I noticed that its file system is MS-DOS (FAT32), which sounds very strange to me since it should be one of the supported ones.

Is it possible that "El Capitan" or "High Sierra" could have used an HD with a file system is MS-DOS (FAT32) to do the backup at that time?
And how can I open this backup and select the files I need to recover?
Btw, the only file I can see in the HD has this extension, .lnk


Thanks in advance for any help!
M

 

[chrfr]

Hello everybody,


A couple of months ago my previous Macbook Pro got stolen (still crying) and, since I never found it again, I bought another one.

My question is about Time Machine.
On that Macbook, I had "El Capitan" at the beginning and then "High Sierra" until the last moment, and on this new one I have "Mojave".

Some years ago I used my external drive as a Time Machine backup, and now I wanted to use it to recover part of the stuff I lost thanks to the thief, but my new Mac can't see it as a Time Machine drive.
I tried everything I know or found online as a guide to make Time Machine recognize the HD as a backup drive, unsuccessfully.

The external drive is an SSD, it works perfectly, I can see it in finder, no problem with it until I noticed that its file system is MS-DOS (FAT32), which sounds very strange to me since it should be one of the supported ones.

Is it possible that "El Capitan" or "High Sierra" could have used an HD with a file system is MS-DOS (FAT32) to do the backup at that time?
And how can I open this backup and select the files I need to recover?
Btw, the only file I can see in the HD has this extension, .lnk


Thanks in advance for any help!
M

Time Machine never worked on FAT32 disks, and if the only file you see on it is a .lnk file that leads me to believe that the drive has been erased.

 

[massimoimperatore]

Time Machine never worked on FAT32 disks, and if the only file you see on it is a .lnk file that leads me to believe that the drive has been erased.

Hi chrfr,

thank you for your reply, it's actually impossible that the drive as been erased since I've been the only one using it ever since.
Also, the HD is 120GB, and half of it is used, which means that something should be there, I guess.

 

[madrich]

Are you using the migration assistant to transfer your data to the new computer? If not, you should. You cannot open TM sparse bundles with different OSXs.

 

[Honza1]

Mojave should be able to read the external TM disk. Did you look at the disk using Disk Utility? Make sure you do not make any changes! Disk Utility will show you what is on the drive - may be it is split in partitions?
But all older macOS system, you named require using HFS+ formatted disks for TM. Current (Big Sur) can use APFS disks. MSDOS (FAT32) disks never worked.
I have bad experience with events like this, when weird thing happens to disk, data, format,... Usually it means all data are lost. I am bit paranoid on backups, so in my case I have about 4 various backups.
Here is plausible scenario which would result in disk being formatted as MSDOS disk: Someone took this disk and attached it to any Windows PC. Since no Windows PC can read HFS+ disks, the disk looks to Windows as unformatted and Windows displays innocent message similar to: "This disk cannot be used in this system, do you want to fix it?". And positive answer will reformat the disk and all data are gone.
I am not saying this happened, but this is how data are lost by "accident" due to poor understanding of stupidities of disk formats by users - and programmers who assume that their system is all there is in the world and provide NO warning about destruction they decided to unleash on user data.

 

[Nermal]

Connect the drive and type "diskutil list" in Terminal, then post the results.

 

[madrich]

Connect the drive and type "diskutil list" in Terminal, then post the results.

The original poster has gone silent since 01/09/21. Apparently his problem does not need our help anymore.