Best practice for PC-3000 Data Extractor recovering Time Machine backups

datahaze

Member
So because of the way Time Machine creates hard-linked filesystems, extracting the entire backups.backupdb folder will take many more times the amount of space than it actually should since data extractor treats each backup as it's own seperate file tree and you end up with many, many duplicates. But, of course, extracting only the most recent backup folder only gets recently changed files, not older un-changed files.

Is there some better way to do this? Maybe a way to extract a copy of the all non-deleted files from the backup? Or is there some other tool you'd suggest aside from Data Extractor for this? It seems crazy to me that PC-3000 does not have the capability to extract data from what is maybe the most popular consumer backup format on the planet. Am I missing some built-in function for this?

In an ideal world, data extractor could replicate all the hardlinks (or replace w softlinks) depending on the type of filesystem it's being extracted to.
 
Top