My Time Machine backup has 100+ dated backups. What I'd like to be able to do is extract the backups for a particular folder to another location, with the result being like TM's archive (where multiple references to unchanged files are just links to 1 copy). Effectively, this would be a copy of the original TM archive, but only for the selected folder (and it's subfolders). Is there any utility which can do this?
Mac – Selective Time Machine copy
time-machine
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Best Answer
dittodidn't cut it, butrsyncdid. It has a--link-destoption, that uses files in that folder as the base to link to for duplicates. It's important that the source path for rsync end in/.To prepare, in the location I'm going to store my copy, I create a symlink to the 1st archived folder I want to copy:
ln -s -h -f /Volumes/MyBook\ 2/Backups.backupdb/Mini/2012-08-02-003832/Macintosh\ HD/Users/jerrybarrington/pathtothefolder/ /Volumes/MyBook\ /Volumes/MyBook\ 2/CK2.backup/Last.Then to copy:
sudo rsync -a --delete --link-dest=/Volumes/MyBook\ 2/CK2.backup/Last/ /Volumes/MyBook\ 2/Backups.backupdb/Mini/2012-08-02-003832/Macintosh\ HD/Users/jerrybarrington/pathtothefolder/ /Volumes/MyBook\ 2/CK2.backup/2012-08-02-003832/.Lastly, update the symlink to point to the new copy:
ln -s -h -f /Volumes/MyBook\ 2/CK2.backup/2012-08-02-003832/ /Volumes/MyBook\ 2/CK2.backup/Last.For each subsequent copy, repeat step 2, changing both instances of
2012-08-02-003832to the next date I want, and then repeat step 3.see http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ for my inspiration.