time machine headache

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Alandata Recovery

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Feb 25, 2026, 4:30:12 PM (6 days ago) Feb 25
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I have a 5tb seagate with TM
Customer wants his TM complete.
I imaged the drive but mac wont mount
and wont repair.
So I have to use DR programs to try to copy the files.
The TM folder structure creates a billion links to files that bog down the copy.
Hasn't this been solved?
Cant a program descend the folders and only copy the unique versions and ignore the linkked duplicates? Why is this so hard.
Or I am doing something wrong.
I note that many DR companies simply say they wont do TM and carbon Copy Cloner also says "sorry not doing TM"
I have tried RS, UFS and UFS pro
UFS ran overnight and copied 4gb.
image.png
This is ridiculous - what the hell is it doing?  reading forever with an occaisional write.

Is there some setting I have wrong ?
Is it really this bad?
image.png
Here are the settings I have
image.png


DISPLAY PROGRESS 
with enabled it spends hours and hours trying to calculate the the gigabytes which ends up with EXABYTES of fake numbers.
So thats off.

RECOVER EXTENDED ATTRIBUTES
maybe should be off...

RESTORE SYMBOLIC LINKS
off
but not sure about this - hoped it would skip the fake links to the original files

DEDUPLICATION
disabled.
When I have used this before UFFS made a folder that is apparently every file that its copying in one gigantic pile
Then it what compares each file before it copies it and if its the same then it skips?
The problem is the giganto folder is so full that NTFS goes to sleep trying to add or find a file.
This isnt NTFS but - I dunno - maybe its the answer....

Question 1: So any advice for this ?

Question 2:
Apples weak sauce FSCK is useless.
DATA RESCUE? used to actually repair the file system - but I think its no longer current...
I havent tried command line DISKUTIL commands yet -maybe that would work.

Thanks for letting me rant

APPLE - GRRRRRR ! ! !



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Data Recovery Guru

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Feb 25, 2026, 4:39:01 PM (6 days ago) Feb 25
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Try DiskWarrior to fix the file system. It provides a preview before commiting to applying the changes.

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RecuperoDati299

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Feb 26, 2026, 2:49:17 AM (5 days ago) Feb 26
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Hello

you are not aware of the real point.

99,99% of that structure are symlinks

You should copy off only the most recent subdir in the structure

and it will process the whole copy correctly

Alandata Recovery

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Feb 26, 2026, 2:26:08 PM (5 days ago) Feb 26
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what should I copy with ?

How?

I realize that 99% is links
But all those links choke most of the tools that I have tried.
CarbonCopyCloner - refuses TM because of this.
Recent versions of macos have some new special handling of TM folders.
In this case macos doesnt see the filesystem.
So some recovery tool must be used.
UFS Pro goes into a coma looking at these folders.
So what is your method please.
Thanks


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Alandata Recovery

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Feb 26, 2026, 7:52:14 PM (5 days ago) Feb 26
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looks like diskutility restore is the ticket...
image.png
image.png

Alandata Recovery

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Feb 26, 2026, 8:02:31 PM (5 days ago) Feb 26
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So
Customer gave me a bare seagate 5tb.
Drive had corrupt startup.
Fixed and cloned to a new 6tb portable USB.
But the drive would not mount.
After examination I figured out that the original seagate had been formatted using 4k sectors
But I cloned it to a 512b sector usb drive.
So all the gpt maps were wrong.
gpt table that should be at sector 1 was at sector 8.

So a recloned the bad drive to another seagate 5tb sata
then plugged it into a seagate usb3 dock
The Seagate dock virtually converts 8 sectors to 4k sector mapping
Now the gpt table appears to start at 1

now the drive mounts under macos
and diskutil restore is running full speed.

its cloning at 180mb/s
wahoo!

RecuperoDati299

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Feb 27, 2026, 7:11:34 AM (4 days ago) Feb 27
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