Macos – Mount Mac disk image (and sparse bundle) on Windows or Linux

As far as I know, you can mount the .sparseimage, and run "Repair/Verify" in Disk Utility, like you could on any other disk....

And like any other disk, always try to "eject" or dismount before powering off or restarting the computer..

I have seen them get corrupted before, but not for a long time... I think it might have been a non-Snow Leopard issue. BTW, sparse "disks" are how Apple stores your "Home" folder when you use FileVault (which are gone in Lion, so don't go ecrypting your home folder, now... they just encrypt the whole disk)

My favorite command is the following, which shrinks the sparseimage down to the actual amount of data you have stored in it, no matter how large it had grown to by adding files which you have now deleted..

hdiutil compact /Macintosh\ HD/Path/to/Name\ of\ file.sparseimage

BTW, the backslashes ( \ ) are only required if you have spaces in your file pathname.

Time Machine doesn't back up the contents of mounted drives for a few reasons. For example:

1. Mounted images can be very transient. If /Volumes/MyVolume exists on Monday but disappears on Tuesday, should it consider those files no longer existing and therefore remove from future backups? What if MyVolume comes back on Wednesday? Now it has to make a whole new copy of the contents again because it can't be sure the files are same ones it saw on Wednesday.

2. What if yesterday it's mounted as /Volumes/MyVolume but today it's mounted as /Volumes/OurVolume. Does Time Machine have to make a whole duplicate copy?

3. Backing up the contents of an image in addition to the image itself would waste space on your backup volume. You'd essentially be storing two copies of every file.

However, you can view past backups manually without taking the time to restore them. Browse to your Time Machine volume. For example, mine looks like this:

/Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb/Hypatia/
    2009-11-27-163215/
    2009-12-11-075355/
    ....
    2010-06-22-004524/
        Hypatia/
            Applications/
            Developer/
            Library/
            System/
            Users/

Rather than using the fancy Time Machine interface, if you are looking for a specific version of an image (or bundle) file, I suggest looking through those dated folders and mounting the backup copies of your image file directly. You can open the folder that contains the dated folders then use the window's Spotlight search to find every copy of the image you're looking for (i.e., search for "NameOfImage.sparsebundle").

This way, you save the step of copying it back to your system drive and overwriting whatever is there. It's a little more tedious than using Time Machine's goofy interface, but it gets the job done.