So what I want to do: Enlarge a sparse image to make room for a rebuilt b-tree.
What happened: I normally backup my system onto a sparse bundle time machine image. And then that bundle (all the bands files) can be sent to an offsite backup service. While this may seem odd, it has the benefit that the time machine drive contains all the permission and ownership information correctly (otherwise lost in the backup service which stores the data, not the meta-data). The problem? Drive failure, restore drive from the service, and the time machine drive is not consistent. So far this is as-expected, actually. Since the data is being updated as it's being copied out, having a file system that needs repairing is expected. What I did next: Attached the sparse bundle of the time machine backup with a shadow image file, and then try to fsck it. Came back with a damaged b-tree that needs to be rebuilt. And not enough space on the drive image to rebuild it. So the next idea was to try to resize the sparse bundle. The restore data came back on an 8 TB drive, when it was just about 6 TB of data -- so there's room to make it bigger. Problem: I can't find a way to enlarge an *unmounted* disk image. I can't mount it without cleaning it. And I can't clean it without enlarging it. Does anyone see a way to make this happen? The goal is to make the disk image (.sparsebundle/) bigger to permit fsck to run. My first thought is to just edit the sparsebundle info file to be bigger; but that's the equivalent of a bigger drive without a bigger file system, and then still has the problem of how do you enlarge a filesystem that won't mount (does anyone know if this is doable?) (The last option is, I believe, disk warrior which I believe permits doing an in-memory rebuilt b-tree for accessing data off the disk). Oh -- during all this, I discovered that shadow mounting is *disk image only*, you cannot actually mount a drive itself as a shadow mount (there's 50+gb free on another drive, I could easily work with that) to keep it "recoverable" if something fails. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com https://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
