2024-10-27
Turns out I could access the files the whole time! I just have to copy them over (which it will let me do), disable the lock mode, and then sudo chmod. There may be an additional step to make this recursive. The drive called “Time Machine 8TB” has backups back to 2021, and it already has a 2022 snapshot. So I can grab Dropbox snapshots from 2023 and 2021.
2024-05-06
This actually didn’t work. The files appear to be there, and certainly took plenty of time to restore, but every single one appears as completely empty. I’m suspecting a difference in OS (MacOS 14 vs 12 or even 13) and disk format (MacOS Extended vs APFS). I’m setting this aside for the moment, but I might try again with an older MacOS version and a MacOS extended formatted drive, perhaps on HK’s old computer.
2024-05-05
If you don’t use migration assistant to essentially reincarnate a computer on a new machine, it will ignore your old backups and start fresh. Accessing those old backups then becomes staggeringly difficult. I used to throw in the towel on this effort. However, it occurred to me that the Dropbox sync issues that Heather and I have had mean that it’s possible we’ve lost data. I’d like to grab my earliest available Dropbox instance, and that’s from 2021.
They essentially only want you to inherit machine state. But you can install the OS to an external drive. So I think you can install the OS externally, then use migration assistant from that install to restore a snapshot. The catch is that you need to erase a volume to do this, and I’d be nervous that this would wind up erasing a whole disk, so I’d prefer that I have an empty one. Also, the modern OS is optimized for SSDs, so you really need one of those.
So I’m clearing out the old NVMe drive that I bought for Applied Nonprofit Research. Once that’s done, I’ll install the OS to that drive, then use migration assistant to restore the 2021 backup. I already restored a 2024-01-31 backup, so that leaves a 2.5 year donut hole. But I don’t have any reason to believe I lost a lot of important data during that time.