TimeMachine Won't give me my files!!!!! HELP ME PLEASE? :(

[LilMissMac]

I backed up my MacBook yesterday with TimeMachine with intentions of formatting and reinstalling today - I did, and now I cannot get to the information on the HD. I can see the applications, and most everything in the apps folder, but even things like "Address book" says an older date than today (October) and it has NOTHING in it! My pictures and EVERYTHING is on that hard drive and I cannot get to it via time machine (when i bring up time machine it shows me only today and that's it!) .....

When it was preparing to do the current back up, or shall I say Time machine (the posessed program it is) was preparing, the power flickered and that's when it seemed to "forget" because before I could see how my desktop was in Time machine the way it was yesterday - with all my pictures, etc! The hard drive still shows it has minus 60+ gigs (which was the size of the back-up i did yesterday), so it's still there somewhere, I just can't find it!!!!! I'm freaking out here b/c it has pictures of my son and daughter on it - pictures of my son since the day he was born, and some important milestones of my daughter as well!!! HELP ME PLEASE!!?!??!

THANK YOU SO MUCH in advance.
Sorry this is so randomly written, I'm panicking a bit here...

 

[Blogger]

Have you tried clicking on the Time Machine disk icon and searching in it directly?

 

[LilMissMac]

Have you tried clicking on the Time Machine disk icon and searching in it directly?

Yes, and after fighting with it for a while I was able to find a small portion of my pictures...... Makes no sense why only some would show and the rest I can't find.

So far my plan is to re-format again and when Leopard prompts me to use my time machine back-up to restore, I will say yes and hopefully that will work to restore and then I can get my photo's and I think be done with Time Machine (for now)... Does this sound like a reasonable plan?

Thank you for your reply.

 

[Blogger]

It sounds to me like a corrupted directory because of the brown-out. I'd try repairing the directory with Diskwarrior and if that doesn't work I've used Data Rescue II from Prosoft Engineering to recover lost files before. It's a laborious process but it worked for me.
I don't think either are completely compatible with Leopard yet, so it might mean a trip back to Tiger to recover your files.

<http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/>
<http://www.prosofteng.com>

 

[SLC Flyfishing]

I used Data Rescue II last night to recover some files that were deleted during an Adobe Lightroom malfunction, I got about 90% of them back and apart from the scan (which took about an hour) I had them all back in a matter of minutes.

SLC