So last night I'm recovering some files from Time Machine when the hourly backup kicks-in and -- get this -- decides to delete the backup I'm actively recovering from (!!!)

I'm currently exploring a) data recovery apps, and b) why I now have backups going all they way back to ... 10pm last evening ...

Any thoughts on a friendly way to recover the backups? I'm using an external raid which is only used for backups, so the data should still be there (hopefully)

The only way is something like FileSalvage or DataRescue to recover erased files. Both have a demo I believe. I like FileSalvage personally, but keep in mind neither recovers in the same file structure as the original drive, they recover by file type, and usually with generic names.

The question is why do your backups only go back to yesterday. How big is your backup drive as compared to how much is on what TM is backing up? It backs up any and all drives connected unless you put them in the do not back up list.

I have seen where a drive had to be wiped, the data was cloned back from a SuperDuper backup, when TM ran the next time it didn't recognize any of the TM backups due to the erase and clone, so it did the whole backup again, filling up the backup drive.

Thanks for the reply -- I have both Data Rescue and File Salvage demos looking at the backup disk now ...

As to why the backups go only until last night, that's a bit worrisome. the backup disk is a 500GB raid, so should have room for the not-nearly-full 500GB hard drive. We'll have to see if it continues to bork-up moving forward.

Right now I'm just hoping to get my Dr. Who, Dexter and Eureka seasons back ;-)

Apple recommends I believe a drive at least twice the size of the data drive for TM backups. Have you made any major changes to either HD recently such as a lot of data copied off and back. Or ran DiskWarrior on it or something which may have changed the directory drastically?

Is the 500G drive the only drive in the machine other than the TM drives?

That is a drag. Downloadable but that's a lot of torrents, and not the quality of DVR or ripped DVD's.

Speaking of Eureka, what happened to that? It just kinda disappeared.

July 10th.

Success!

Salvage recovered 218 video files =)

Now I just have to open each one to find out what it is -- tedious, but made less so as iTunes opens them up, reads the file info and saves a renamed file in the library. Slick!

As for the backup drive, it's a laCie external raid (right now), that I might just un-raid to a 1TB drive and use that instead ...

The problems started when I moved my iTunes library off my main internal HD to another internal -- Time Machine started throwing-up errors saying it didn't have enough room to back-up the moved files (even though I had deleted the old ones off the first internal, TM still had backups of those, so ...) ...

So anyways, I probably borked things up myself by resetting the TM drive in the preferences, which probably was the reason it got rid of all the old backups ...

Anyways, lesson learned, hopefully =)

Thanks for the help! =D

Yeah, it wanted to back up the whole iTunes library again.

Pretty cool how iTunes does all the heavy lifting, thanks for sharing that tip.

Even better: "Add to library ..." does the same thing!

Select the folder of numbered files, and it processes everything inside, renaming the files as it adds them to the iTunes folder. Pretty slick!

I *really* wasn't looking forward to doing that all by hand =)