Linux – How to Mount a Time Machine Sparse Bundle Disk Image

dmg-imagelinuxtime-capsuletime-machine

I am looking to see if Linux can mount and read the files natively stored on a Time Capsule over a network share. Like this question, I am looking for something that replicates at least read-only function of hdiutil to attach and then mount a sparse bundle disk images.

The SMB mount is easy since the Time Capsule shares using both AFP and SMB, but I'm not so sure the sparse disk bundle can be mounted as the reconstituted HFS+ directory.

Bonus points for a working mount command or pointer to the appropriate package that parses this DMG format.

In case it's not clear – this is how the band files look to me when mounted from a Mac in Terminal and what I expect Linux to see without the ability to mount the actual file system that is encoded in a multitude of binary band files.

host:iMac.sparsebundle mike$ ls -la
total 24
drwxrwxrwx@     7 mike  staff      264 Jul  5 10:01 .
drwx------      6 mike  staff      264 Mar 26 13:11 ..
-rwxrwxrwx      1 mike  staff      499 Feb 24 15:33 Info.bckup
-rwxrwxrwx      1 mike  staff      499 Feb 24 15:33 Info.plist
drwxrwxrwx  31101 mike  staff  1057390 Jun 17 20:19 bands
-rwxrwxrwx      1 mike  staff      532 Jun 24 22:06 com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist
-rwxrwxrwx      1 mike  staff        0 Feb 24 15:33 token
host:iMac.sparsebundle mike$ ls -la bands | head -10
total 1582092552
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 Jul  5 08:33 0
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 13:02 1
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 Jun 24 22:16 10
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 Mar 19 17:15 1000
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 10000
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 10001
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 10002
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 10003
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 10004
host:iMac.sparsebundle mike$ ls -la bands | tail -10
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:51 fff6
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:51 fff7
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:51 fff8
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:51 fff9
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:51 fffa
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 fffb
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 fffc
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 fffd
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 fffe
-rwxrwxrwx  1 mike  staff  8388608 May 31 00:50 ffff
host:~ mike$ ls -la bands|wc -l
   96636

Best Answer

You may use a combination of these two:

FUSE filesystem for reading Mac OS sparse-bundle disk images

Apple's Time Machine fuse read only file system

The first takes care of the .sparsebundle format, presenting it as a dmg file, which can then be mounted like normal. The second takes care of the directory hard-links used by Time Machine.

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