Somewhere in Time - cursing the Capsule

When it plays nice, Apple's Time Capsule is a very useful tool to have.

My daughter recently dug a large hole in the back garden. I thought she was just having a strange (well, perhaps not so strange for her) workout but in fact, she told me she wants to bury a time capsule.

Funny, because that's twice in a week I was tripped up by two very different time capsules. One was when I was mowing the lawn and nearly tumbled into an inexplicable hole, the second was when I was using a new Mac but wanted some old files back from an Apple Time Capsule.

You see, I retired one Mac, then got a 13-inch MacBook Pro for a month. It didn't seem worthwhile putting all my files across to another machine just for a month, so I copied a few files I knew I'd need to another hard drive thinking that, if I need anything else, it's safely on the Time Capsule, Apple's wireless backup solution that holds a terabyte of data (recently this model was boosted to 2T for the same price).

All well and good. Until I actually needed that one file. You see, I was not thinking clearly when I did the backup, as after I'd chucked out the files on the retiring Mac, I'd left Apple's free backup software, called Time Machine, running and it had backed up the newly-empty folders.

This shouldn't have been a problem except that Apple's Migration Assistant utility, which lets you migrate files over from another Mac when you get a new one or, as in this case, get files off a Time Capsule, was only seeing that last backup.

Which was empty folders.

Surely there's a way of tapping the contents of the preceding the two, three or four backups, I thought?

So I read some stuff online, and even thought about dropping a support ticket with Apple. Lots of the advice seemed to involve mounting the Time Capsule on your desktop to access the files. I did this easily enough (Connect To Server in the Go menu in the Finder) but this added no missing files to Migration Assistant's list of available items.

In the Finder, the Time Capsule just had a folder called Data. This opened up with the files ending 'sparsebundle' (who names these things?!). There were separate ones for my retired Mac, my daughter's study MacBook and my partner';s iMac. No joy - these 'sparsebundles' just look like files of some strange format, rather than folders full of files.

I did some more online reading and got nowhere. This is when I thought about posting a support ticket. Weirdly, my brother had rung me a few days before with a similar problem; looking for files using Time Machine and an external hard drive to put back on a freshly-zeroed Mac.

To my shame, I don't think I was much help to him. (He managed to sort it out for himself. I wish I'd asked him how he did it.)

This is bloody silly, I thought. You should just be able to double-click on the relevant file and find all your data. It's not like Apple to make things so damned obtuse.

And of course, finally, that's what I did. I double-clicked on the 'Mark Webster _.sparsebundle' thing. And, after a pause for connection ... it did open. As a separate desktop-mounted hard drive. And all my files were listed in the right folders just where you'd expect, for all the subsequent backups over the last few months.

The Time Capsule is connected over wireless so it was not super fast getting the files back (5GBs in a few minutes), but sure enough, everything appeared and I was a very happy man.

Crikey!

Better not tell anyone, I thought ... Thank goodness I didn't post that support ticket. I'd look a right chump. But honestly, nowhere can I recall, or find, anything telling how this would have worked. But hey, I'm really glad it was so easy and so effective. I just wish I'd known about it from the outset.

Was this a case of Apple making things too easy, even for me?

Perhaps.

Meanwhile, I have not managed to crash Snow Leopard once, and it happily runs in 64-bit on both the temporary 13-inch MacBook Pro and on my old 2007 15-inch MacBook Pro. You just hold down the 6 and the 4 keys together on boot.

Apparently, Apple will drop this 32-bit sidestep in the future sometime, but it boots into 32-bit by default in case you have any 32-bit-only software on your Mac.

On the 13-inch, all software extensions are listed as 64-bit. Even on my 'old' 2007 machine, all but six of the extensions list (System Profile>Software>Extensions) as 64-bit. A MacObserver posting tells you how to negotiate this 64-bit stuff.

Oh, and on that 'space-saving' thing? Ever wondered why you bought a 300GB hard drive, plugged it in and it said less than 300GB was available? The hard drive manufacturers were using 1000MBs as a Gigabyte instead of the accepted standard of 1024MBs equalling a Gigabyte. Apple's just doing the same now. I always found that '1024' thing weird, especially as I'm so bad at maths, so that's cool with me. But even so, you're still saving up to 7GB or real space when you install Snow Leopard, going by the old method.

On more in-depth reading, Snow Leopard really does appear as more promissory than actual in many respects. In other words, it really looks like upcoming Macs will get a lot more performance out of it. And I do like that idea.

- Mark Webster mac.nz