04-05-2010, 04:35 AM

Due to problems I was having with my Mac running slow after upgrading to Snow Leopard when it was first released, the other day I completely wiped my Mac and did a complete re-install of Snow Leopard.

The good news is that my Mac is now back to being very fast and working perfectly. The bad news is that I am unable to restore certain files from my Time Machine drive!

When I re-installed SL I completely blitzed the drive and didn't migrate my old user account from my Time Machine backup because I didn't realise I could. So my old user account was say peakoverload and when I re-installed SL I again called my account peakoverload with the same password as I used before, effectively recreating the same account.

I then installed the applications I wanted and set about restoring my files from Time Machine.

I entered Time Machine, went back to the day before I re-installed SL, selected the Documents folder and hit restore. All single files in the root of the documents folder were restored but any files within sub folders were not? To restore these I then had to go into the relevant sub folder in Time Machine, select the files and hit restore. I found that if files were in sub folders I got an error message saying:

"The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some items"

I worked around this and simply restored each file(s) individually.

However I then noticed that my Aperture Library file had not been fully restored showing up as 0KB whereas in Time Machine it's over 7GB.

No matter what I try I cannot restore this file getting this error message:

"The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access Aperture Library"

Looking at the permissions of this file in Time Machine it says that: peakoverload (Me) has Read & Write privilege (but is that the new me or the old me and does that matter?)
_unknown has read privilege
everyone has read privilege

If I try to add user privileges peakoverload is greyed out, presumably because it's already added but I can add administrators. However my peakoverload account is an administrator one yet even adding this permission doesnt allow me to restore the file!

Any ideas what I can do to restore this file?

04-05-2010, 07:19 AM

Rename your new user account to something else (do this in System Preferences > Accounts - not just manually rename the folder), then you should be able to restore peakoverload in its entirety

04-05-2010, 11:11 AM

Cheers for that. I tried that but unfortunately it didn't work. However I did manage to resolve it by using Toast to create a disc image of my Aperture Library from within my Time Machine backup. Then mounting the image and simply copying the contents to my Pictures folder.