erm help, customers data has disappeared (mac mini - time machine)

[Big Jim]

Have a Mac mini running mojave customer has tried to update to Big Sur themselves but it failed.
The reason appears to be that Big Sur wants to use APFS and the drive can't be converted with a live OS on it.
So we ran a full time machine backup, verified it had ran, then reformatted the drive and installed big Sur clean, during setup opted to restore data from time machine backup, it failed (i didn't see the message my Tech did so don't know exactly what it said) we left it running overnight I came in this morning to a flashing folder icon, holding option key showed no drives at all.
booted to Mac OS from a bootable USB stick and the time machine drive now says it is empty.

what the hell happened ?
and how do I recover the time machine drive now ?

 

[Markverhyden]

How does the TM drive connect. If it's USB you can hook it up to another machine and use R-Studio to scan the drive. It has a trial mode so if it looks good you can then have the customer buy the license.

 

[Big Jim]

How does the TM drive connect. If it's USB you can hook it up to another machine and use R-Studio to scan the drive. It has a trial mode so if it looks good you can then have the customer buy the license.

The TM drive is ours, its a WD 2TB portable drive.
I didn't know there was an R-Studio for Mac, we use it in windows already

 

[Markverhyden]

The TM drive is ours, its a WD 2TB portable drive.
I didn't know there was an R-Studio for Mac, we use it in windows already

The underlying OS for running rstudio has nothing to do with the file system. You can run it on Linux, m$, or Mac and recover a different file system. So you’re existing should read macos. Just not sure of apfs.

 

[Big Jim]

The underlying OS for running rstudio has nothing to do with the file system. You can run it on Linux, m$, or Mac and recover a different file system. So you’re existing should read macos. Just not sure of apfs.

Thanks Mark,

out of interest, being apple focused have you ever had this happen to you ?

 

[Markverhyden]

Thanks Mark,

out of interest, being apple focused have you ever had this happen to you ?

10-15 years ago a corrupted TM store happened though it's rare. But I haven't seen one in a long time. I have seen HD's "loose" everything. As in no file structure. But that's been M$ and Linux, not yet in Apple ecosystem. But it's rare no matter what.

If a customer has no TM backups, or any other for that matter, I'll grab their profile and then separately run a TM backup. Make sure it runs 2-3 more times and then test a restore to a USB attached disk. I know it's time consuming but it's the best practice. It's similar to what I'll do for other OS's The problem I've had with corrupted TM stores is TM runs without any problems, you can browse the store, but the restore fails.

 

[Big Jim]

So R-Studio recovery (multiple attempts) has been ran.
a recovery of root directory (including metafiles) takes less than a minute and yields around 150MB data.

I am able to recover what I believe to be most of the customers data from extra found files but obviously they are in no order whatsoever.
I assume at this stage that is my only solution.

 

[Markverhyden]

Yeah it sounds like extra found will be your only option now if it didn't find a partition table. Stinks but that's the way it is sometimes.