Despairing on how to retrieve pictures

[stevenaive]

Folks I am hoping you can help me. I thought I had backed up a bunch of photos of our son over the last 2 years using Time Machine. However my backup drive is only showing them up to the beginning of the year - user error I am sure.

My wife has an old desktop Mac she bought in 2007; we are using OSX 10.4 or something.

Recently it started squealing and whistling but I thought no worries I have everything backed up. Not so. I now get intermittently a grey screen, a grey screen with the Apple logo, or the panic ? picture on the screen.

I've tried PRAM reset which plays the organ chord nicely over and over but nothing more. Also tried holding down the shift key whilst powering up; it now gives me the message about missing a driver for this platform ACPI; please restart your machine.

I understand you can reinstall the OS X from the CDs that came with the machine. I've inserted CD1 but when I get to the Q about choosing a volume to install the OS X to there is nothing to choose from.

I've scoured the forums for the last couple of days and found many similar issues. I've now registered myself in the hope someone will be able to assist. As an absolute last resort I am prepared to take the machine for an 'expert' to look at it because those contents of the hard drive that are not successfully backed up are irreplaceable to us.

All help very gratefully received.

Thanks, Steve

 

[stevenaive]

Folks I am hoping you can help me. I thought I had backed up a bunch of photos of our son over the last 2 years using Time Machine. However my backup drive is only showing them up to the beginning of the year - user error I am sure.

My wife has an old desktop Mac she bought in 2007; we are using OSX 10.4 or something.

Recently it started squealing and whistling but I thought no worries I have everything backed up. Not so. I now get intermittently a grey screen, a grey screen with the Apple logo, or the panic ? picture on the screen.

I've tried PRAM reset which plays the organ chord nicely over and over but nothing more. Also tried holding down the shift key whilst powering up; it now gives me the message about missing a driver for this platform ACPI; please restart your machine.

I understand you can reinstall the OS X from the CDs that came with the machine. I've inserted CD1 but when I get to the Q about choosing a volume to install the OS X to there is nothing to choose from.

I've scoured the forums for the last couple of days and found many similar issues. I've now registered myself in the hope someone will be able to assist. As an absolute last resort I am prepared to take the machine for an 'expert' to look at it because those contents of the hard drive that are not successfully backed up are irreplaceable to us.

All help very gratefully received.

Thanks, Steve

Adding, I can get to the Terminal session on the boot disk. Can I use this to access the files on the hard drive and copy them to another USB drive I mount?

 

[stevenaive]

Another addition which does not bode well (though I am an amateur in this): running diskutil list in the Terminal session from the OS X install disc does not show anything which looks like the hard disc....

 

[sgould]

If you look at your Time Machine disc via the finder, not the Time Machine itself, can you see more than one backup? The backup item that is used by Time Machine is called "Backups.backupdb" on my disc. If you open it, it will show the computer being backed up and then the dates of all the backups. Do you find more than one backup or computer, or even dates going back more than a year? If so your old info is on there somewhere.

As to the disc that is failing. Noises are not good. But I have recovered data from a "failed" disc by removing i and putting it in a cheap external enclosure. On a couple of occasions I have found the data there. But my failures were in the surrounding circuitry; they were not mechanical.

Here's the Time Machine listing from Finder

 

[stevenaive]

Thanks for the reply. The problem with the TM backup is that for the most recent ones, due to misunderstanding how TM works, I excluded some folders from the backup process. Unfortunately I excluded the wrong ones.

 

[Satcomer]

Plus Time Machine is deletes old files after room on the drive so it starts deleting old files.

First learning about Cloniog OS X (A Clone makes a backup bootable in OS X, even from an external) and IMHO I feel the best is Carbon Copy Cloner while other Mac users like the software SuperDuper.

If i were you (with family photos, etc)I would move the iPhoto Library according to this Apple document iPhoto '11: Move your iPhoto library to a new location. Then Clone that precious database to another external. This way you could always be safe.

 

[DeltaMac]

Just to clear up a possible mis-interpretation of what Satcomer said:
Time Machine will remove old backups if the backup volume runs low on space.
Those removed will only be TMs copies of anything that no longer exist on any other backup.

From Pondini's excellent Time Machine FAQs:
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

Although it deletes a backup, it doesn't necessarily delete its copies of all the items that were on that backup. It only deletes its copies of things that no longer exist on any other backup. Thus you won't lose the backup of anything that's currently on your system, or the ability to restore your entire system from any remaining backup, since all Time Machine backups are, in effect, full backups.

Those FAQs will also help you decide in the future, which files or folders to exclude from your backup. You may find out that those folders may already be excluded already, and can help you decide if you need to make some changes to how you use your Desktop, in the quest to make backups more efficient, and perhaps (in your case) making it somewhat easier to recover files if your hard drive fails (which would be your current situation)