From cde62ed6b8dc65c6ca6bdfecced73087547ff2f1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: =?UTF-8?q?Tor=20Arne=20Vestb=C3=B8?= Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 01:34:14 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] Add note about Time Machine backups --- README.md | 13 ++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index ffb58f9..5633dca 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -57,6 +57,16 @@ You may then proceed to mount the `.dmg` file using regular means, *eg.*: This will give you read-only access to the content of the sparse-bundle disk image. +### Reading Time Machine backups + +Time Machine builds on a feature of the HFS+ filesystem called *directory hard-links*. This allows multiple snapshots of the backup set to reference the same data, without having to maintain hard-links for every file in the backup set. + +Unfortunately this feature is not yet part of `mount.hfsplus`, so when navigating the mounted Time Machine image these directory hard-links will show up as empty files instead of directories. The real data still lives inside a directory named `.HFS+ Private Directory Data\r` at the root of the volume, but making the connection from a a zero-sized file to it's corresponding directory inside the secret data location is a bit cumbersome. + +Luckily there's another FUSE filesystem available, [tmfs][tmfs], which will allow you to re-mount an existing HFS+ volume and then navigate it as if the directory hard-links were regular directories. The syntax is similar to sparsebundlefs: + + tmfs /mnt/tm-hfs-image /mnt/tm-root + License ------- @@ -66,4 +76,5 @@ This software is licensed under the [BSD two-clause "simplified" license][bsd]. [osxfuse]: http://osxfuse.github.com/ "Fuse for OSX" [fuse]: http://fuse.sourceforge.net/ "FUSE" -[bsd]: http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause "BSD two-clause license" \ No newline at end of file +[bsd]: http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause "BSD two-clause license" +[tmfs]: https://github.com/abique/tmfs "Time Machine File System" \ No newline at end of file