Access Mint Backups on a Mac

[steveeldonkerr]

Hi all,

So my ACER Aspire One 722 was stolen a few weeks ago. I was running mint 12 with more or less all the updates. I had been using mintbackup, or whatever the standard backup tool in Mint 12 is to backup my files. Now I'm at my parents house trying to access them. My parents have an Intel Imac OS10.5. When I connect the harddrive I get a bunch of .difftar.gz files - all 50mb - that I dont know what to do with. I have attached a screenshot of the harddrive. How can I access my files? What should I do?

thanks very much,

[AlbertP]

.gz are archive files just like .zip (or .sit for Mac users). Probably you can open them and find your files inside. On Windows you can use 7zip (free software) to open Linux archive formats like .gz, .tar.gz or .tar.bz2, but the Mac already seems to recognize the filetype.

[steveeldonkerr]

thanks. the problem is everything is split up, and when i open the compressed folders and look what is inside, all the files are really small and will not open (see the size of the mp3s...)

I've posted a new screenshot below if anyone has any ideas what I should do

[Erikwas]

Why not run mint12 from a live cd on the iMac?

[steveeldonkerr]

hmmn. I tried that and the CD kept crashing when restoring the files. Anyone have any other ideas?

[dalcde]

This is how (I think) the back up is done: every time we backup the system, we record CHANGES instead of the whole system. The .difftar.gz files are the records of the differences. The original copy is the sigtar.gz (I believe - I don't do backup). When you apply all the difftar changes, you get the new system. It's just a wild guess based on the naming and how people normally do backups. You might want to do some more research.