Get time machine off corrupt disk

I have had a power trip and my TM disk is corrupt, the OS doesn't mount it initially and then says Disk Utility is unable to repair the drive, copy off as much as you can and then re-format the drive (something along those lines! Not at the mac at the moment, will put the correct message up later).

I've retried repairing the disk, this fails, I just get given a read only disk with no ownership. I've tried all sorts to get the disk off and everything has failed so far, I'm after some suggestions on how I could get it off.

I've tried to simply move it and finder says you need ownership of the source volume. I've tried using iArchive to create a zip file on the other disk, iArhive crashes. I've tried goodsync to sync it across, goodsync won't sync without analysing first and analysing runs out of memory!! I tried to FTP it and FTP doesn't like moving the files, is there any simple way of avoiding the ownership issues? Note, I can't set the ignore ownership setting through info as I don't have appropriate permissions (it's not available for that disk anyway).

Thanks!

This seems like a lot of work to me.

Why not just buy a new drive, plug it in, let TM make a new backup?

You're not losing anything except stuff you have deleted off your computer -- presumably because you didn't want it.

chas_m said:

Why not just buy a new drive, plug it in, let TM make a new backup?

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I mean no offence...that does seem to be the recommendation of choice, but it's not solving my problem.

chas_m said:

You're not losing anything except stuff you have deleted off your computer -- presumably because you didn't want it.

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Not strictly true - it is a timeline of CHANGES. So yes there's stuff I've deleted, but also stuff I've changed. Who's to say I might not want to revert back to a previous version of something and I don't know it yet?

My Mac has all my family photos and videos on it and I'm not willing to simply do away with this backup unless I really don't have any other option. Preferably, even if the backup doesn't form part of my existing TimeMachine, I want to try to keep it as a precaution.

chas_m said:

This seems like a lot of work to me.

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Whether it's hard work or not depends on the value of the content really ;D If I knew how to copy the data off without OSX worrying about me not having ownership to the folder, it would be sorted.

Ok so I've learnt a bit about using Terminal yesterday and it would seem that whilst Finder requires ownership of the source, doing the same through Terminal doesn't. So a simple cp command has done the trick and my TM backups are being transferred:

sudo cp -r [source] [desination]

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