Corrupted iPad backup on my Mac

[y_p_w]

I was doing something I've done before, which was restore an iPhone or iPad to factory conditions, then restore to the backup. I was having some general sluggishness and some capacity that seemed to be stuck in the "Other" category for an iPad mini 6. At one time it was perhaps the only way I could free up enough storage to do an update or when my 16 GB devices were running way low on storage, where it would free up at least a little bit of the storage when done. And I did it before when I got my iPad mini 6 replaced under warranty with the one I'm trying to back up now.

The computer is an old MacBook Pro (2012) running Catalina. Kind of old but still compatible with recent iPads and iPhones.

But I didn't archive an older backup as insurance, but made a single (new) backup before I did all this. When I tried to restore, it went maybe halfway through the restoration before I got a message that my backup was corrupted and it couldn't restore. I have heard there might be some third-party restore tools available for corrupted backups, but I've got Time Machine and I'm trying to restore the entire backup directory (<username>/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup) to the last backup that was there before it was overwritten. And it's pretty slow, as I think it might actually be trying to restore something like 75 GB of backups from my Time Machine backup.

I figure I might lose some of stuff and I copied those, like a few mostly useless photos and screen captures. I don't really need them in my default photo library and I figure I won't be able to put them back if I can manage to get the old backup to restore. But those are stashed away just in case I might need them.

I'm just hoping that the corruption isn't something that's old (I believe backups are incremental) and possibly irrecoverable. I'm wondering if I should have previously just deleted that iPad mini 6 backup and started over with a new, clean backup - if maybe there was some corruption previously.

One heck of a way to spend Christmas night.

 

[racer12306]

That sucks.

Used to be the wire was the only reliable method for updating/restores. I actually just did it the other week when we gave my daughter my wife's iPad and my wife my daughter's iPad.

I haven't used it in years, but I remember iMazing being a great tool. I remember putting game data that I had on an iPhone onto an iPad.

Best of luck

 

[y_p_w]

I let it run overnight. It then prompted me if I wanted to delete all the duplicate directories in Backup which I did. Said it would take two hours, then one, but it then stopped saying that one file or directory was unreadable. Then all the backups were gone other than a few new ones. This is turning into a really bad week.

Then my Mac froze and I forced it to power down.

Now I think my Mac’s boot volume might be corrupted. At least where it won’t boot although I think the files might still be there. I’m writing this my my iPad mini which is more or less close to factory condition without all the photos. I’m trying to use Internet Recovery to see if maybe I can do First Aid using Disk Utility. I previously tried using what I though was a cloned, bootable volume, but the bar got stuck (I might have been impatient).

It’s certainly been a learning experience. I’ve never recovered from Time Machine other than an occasional directory that I had deleted. Nothing this complicated. Worst case would be I need to reload the whole thing, if my SSD is still usuable.

 

[y_p_w]

First Aid is taking a while. I’m thinking my attempts to boot were just slow because it was doing really long repairs. But hopefully I can at least boot again and see what happens with the backups. If I can get my Mac to work again, I’m thinking of just restoring one backup and seeing how far back I need to go before I get one that’s not corrupted.

 

[y_p_w]

I don’t think my Mac is going to boot. Now it’s just goinging into a reboot loop. Im now getting a flashing question mark. I’m thinking most of the data is intact though.

I think a new SATA SSD might be what I need.

 

[y_p_w]

It’s clearly not going to boot. I’ll need to recover from a backup to a new SSD. I had this (WD Blue 3D, 1 TB) since 2019. I was thinking about proactively replacing it before, but never got around to it.

 

[y_p_w]

So I got a new SATA SSD and had a few fits and starts. I originally wanted to do a new barebones install of MacOS Catalina where I could at least have a working Mac. I then wanted to see (via an external enclosure) if my data on my corrupted drive is still readable. I figured it might just be something messed up with the OS and not the entire file system. But I couldn’t get the agree selection for the terms and conditions to proceed.

So I figured I would just try and do a migration. I thought maybe from the original drive, but it didn’t seem to recognize that as a boot drive. So I used my Time Machine backup, where the last full backup was from the morning of the day my Mac got messed up. I’m thinking it’s going to take a while. Possibly a whole day? I’m just hoping it doesn’t just give up if some of the files are unreadable.

 

[y_p_w]

So it's starting to look like I really messed up. Managed to do a clean install of macOS Catalina on a new SATA SSD. I did it a second time, and figured out how to get it to load (skipping entering an Apple ID). But now that I can see my old drive in an enclosure, it may be toast. I saw the contents come up briefly where I saw all the top level directories, but now I see nothing. Disk Utility shows it's there but is saying it can't even do First Aid and to back up data if possible.

I may end up just installing MacOS again and recovering from my Time Machine backup so I can try and get a working iPad backup to restore from. But right I got my Mac to work. Maybe I'll recover from Time Machine this weekend.

I have a cloned backup that I could try instead. I think it was last backed up in November which might not be ideal. But I'll probably try Time Machine first even though it looks like it might take more than a day to copy over.

 

[y_p_w]

I decided to try and recover my Mac from a backup. Originally it was saying it was going to take about 26 hours but occasional updates changed to less than 3 and then maybe 1.6 hours. But I just left it overnight after after a little bit of setup stuff it's back to where it was before with maybe a few things. Like my admin avatar is blank, but I figure that's something I can change. And I'm posting this from my computer, so at least that's good now.

I'm going to try and recover my iPad mini 6 again although there might be the same possibility that it the backup files were corrupted. I suppose if it is I can try and use Time Machine to go back, only this time with a more stable boot drive.

And so far my attempt to recover my iPad mini 6 contents is going past the point where it failed before. I think it might have been because my Mac's drive was failing.

 

[y_p_w]

So everything is more or less back to normal, but with a few things that are kind of wonky until they settle. I think my Mac is slow because it's indexing the drive for search. The iPad mini 6 backup worked flawlessly and the app started reloading once the contents/settings were restored.

I also tried to see if my old drive worked or if it was a file system corruption. Can't do anything with the drive. Since everything was backed up I tried to see if I could reformat, and that failed because of an IO write error. So the drive itself is gone. Not sure what caused the failure, but it was a WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB SATA SSD that I bought in the summer of 2019. So I figure about 5-1/2 years was a pretty good run, and I at least had a backup. For a while I was thinking Time Machine was slow and useless, but it's redeemed itself for me.

The replacement was what I could get on short notice on a tight budget which is a 1 TB WD Blue SA510. Might not be the best drive available drive for the job, but it'll have to do until I can justify getting a new drive (maybe a Crucial MX or a SanDisk Ultra 3D). Looks like WD's consumer grade SATA SSDs top out at the Blue SA510, which some claim was just a rebranding of the WD Green series.

 

[y_p_w]

I am wondering if perhaps my old Time Machine backups are retrievable if I ever need them. As soon as I had it running again I saw it was automatically connecting to the old backup drive with the Time Machine backup, even though I had changed the name of the boot drive to something new. It hasn't cleared up any space yet, where it's a 2 TB partition (on a 4 TB bus-powered hard drive) with about 1.85 TB used. But when I look at Time Machine I only see snapshots for this morning and a few minutes ago.

Overall I wouldn't be upset if it can create a retrievable backup. However, I was previously hoping that I might be able to retrieve an older version of my iPad mini 6 backup if it was corrupted (which it wasn't).

 

[y_p_w]

Overall I wouldn't be upset if it can create a retrievable backup. However, I was previously hoping that I might be able to retrieve an older version of my iPad mini 6 backup if it was corrupted (which it wasn't).

FYI for anyone desperate enough to care....

I let it ruminate for a bit and eventually it's showing several months of backups in Time Machine. Apparently it didn't matter that I had changed the boot volume name, which is automatically the top level even if it's different in a recovery.

I looked through my photos on my recovered iPad mini 6, and at least one of the photos is corrupted. But I'd saved almost all the photos separately so that's not a big issue losing one photo to view directly from the "Camera Roll".

 

[JHZR2]

Wow what an ordeal!

FYSA you can code your Mac to have your iOS backup drive be an external. I use a USB C ssd to aid in speed of backups. My photos on my phone (yes I do download them all) are valuable memories to me so I don’t want my phone backup to corrupt or be lost. This is the best approach I’ve seen to be sure that I have solid backups.

I haven’t had to use them, but copying the current backup to a different directory lets it be archived, then backup again to the drive.

 

[y_p_w]

Wow what an ordeal!

FYSA you can code your Mac to have your iOS backup drive be an external. I use a USB C ssd to aid in speed of backups. My photos on my phone (yes I do download them all) are valuable memories to me so I don’t want my phone backup to corrupt or be lost. This is the best approach I’ve seen to be sure that I have solid backups.

I haven’t had to use them, but copying the current backup to a different directory lets it be archived, then backup again to the drive.

I've got all the camera roll photos and video saved separately, including on a drive that I regularly clone from my boot drive.