Corrupted Backup Folders

[slash]

OSX Snow Leopard, Espionage 2: Backup of all encrypted folders to my Time Capsule HDD.

Now that backup folder is corrupted. I had first uninstalled Espionage, rebooted, then wanted to delete the backup folder on the Time Capsule - endless and endlessly letting the deletion run for hours, even overnight. No result. Stopped the deletion after 16 hours or so.

The folder is visible in Finder, but for example if I right click->get info, the size cannot be calculated, it will load forever. If I go deeper into the backup folder, there is one point at which it wont go any further - e.g. espionageBackups->user->number->SyncServices->endless loading, not showing the contents.

So whatever I do, it always ends in either endless loading of the folder, or endless trying to delete it with no results.

I tried installing the latest Espionage 2 again and add these folders via drag&drop, like it is advised in your help section, so that Espionage "should realise that these are encrypted folders" -  but Espionage just crashes.

Any advice on this situation would be really awesome, because I'm getting a bit worried that this might affect the integrity of the Time Capsule HDD. (which works perfectly fine outside the Espionage backup folder)

Thanks guys

[zsolt]

Hello
So you are saying that the Espionage backup folder, the one Espionage V2 is doing it's backups, is corrupted on your local disk, correct?
And for this reason you wanted to delete the Time Machine backup copy of this folder, from within the Time Machine backup which is located on Time Capsule, correct?
If yes, then: you cannot and should not, manage the folders inside the Time Machine backups using Finder. The Time Machine target folder is a rather complex thing, in spite of looking like a normal folder structure.
First question is: why you want to delete this folder from the backup? Just let Time Machine backup the current (uncorrupted) state of the folder on your local disk and all is good.
If you want to recover some space from the time capsule by deleting the old versions of this folder, then enter time machine, navigate to the folder and right click on it, then select remove old versions....

So these would be the hints, but I'm not sure if I understood you correctly and also I'm not sure why are you doing what you are doing...

Furthermore, in the second section of your post, you suddenly start to talk about adding these folders using drag and drop, but why would you do that if the folders are fine in Espionage, and it is just the backup folder which is corrupted?

Please clarify and then we move on.

Rgds
Zsolt

[slash]

Hey there,

thanks, for the reply, and excuse my explanation, I'll give it another shot:

The situation was the following: I had Espionage V2 installed on Snow Leopard and it was configured inside the Espionage preferences to do backups  - no Time Machine was involved, the backup location was set to my Time Capsule HDD which functioned just as a network HDD - there was no Time Machine backup involved, I had not activated Time Machine at all.

Then along came OSX Lion with the improved File Vault - which was fine for me, so I did not need to use Espionage anymore. Therefore, to get my machine ready to upgrade to OSX Lion, I wanted to uninstall Espionage. So I restored the encrypted folders and then uninstalled Espionage. Which went totally fine.

However, what was left after the uninstallation of Espionage 2 was the backup folder on my Time Capsule HDD. Naturally, I wanted to delete that one as well, since I had no need for it anymore. However, this folder is corrupted (I'm not sure if that's the right expression for how that folder behaves) - I cannot delete it, I cannot open the folder in Finder - it doesn't give me an error, it just keeps on loading, and loading, and loading.

Like you know, the backup folder is several sub-folders deep, and at one point, before reaching the folder where there are 3 folders inside that say something like "THIS FOLDER IS CONTROLLED BY ESPIONAGE....", it stops in an endless loop of loading. The deepest I can get is one folder where it goes:

EspionageBackups->user->number->SyncServices-> endless loading. The other two folder stop at:
EspionageBackups->user->number->endless loading

So in a nutshell: After the uninstall of Espionage V2 I am stuck with a backup folder that cannot be opened, cannot be re-imported into Espionage after re-installation of Espionage, and cannot be deleted.

I hope this clarifies my situation?

[zsolt]

Hello, sorry, it was me introducing the Time Machine into your topic, I assumed this is the backup you are talking about.
So the bottom line is: all you want is delete some disk images from your time capsule, and these happen to be the Espionage backup disk images, correct?

Well, this is more a file system problem then Espionage problem. I do not believe Espionage is locking the images in any way.
It might be a permission problem, please make a right click on the disk image and select show package content, then see if there is any folder which has a protected folder sign. Or once in the disk image content, try to delete the files one by one...
Or, use terminal to delete the files, the command is:

BEFORE US THIS COMMAND READ ON!!!!!

cd diskimagename.sparsebundle
sudo rm -rf *

so this is the command, and the * character means delete all files, but before you execute this command MAKE SURE you are in right folder
The best way you make sure you are there is, write the command

cd

in the terminal, and then drag the disk image from finder into terminal window, this will fill in the path and the name for you.
then hit enter, then run the following command

ls -l

the list of files you get, must be the same what you see in Finder when you select the disk image, right click on it and say show package content.
Once in the terminal you see the same files with ls -l, then and only then you can run the rm command, otherwise the rm command will delete all the files in which ever directory you are!!!!!

use it on your own responsibility.

Let me know if you have further questions.

Rgds
Zsolt

[slash]

Thanks for that very detailed explanation! Yes, Espionage currently does not have anything to do with that problem, however, I highly suspect that it was the cause of the problem back when it created the backup - because something must have gone wrong :/

I have just followed your instructions.

The structure of the backup folder is the following: volumes/data(this is the Time Capsule hdd)/espionage_backup/EspionageBackups/user/numbers/...

These were my steps:

cd volumes/data/espionage_backup
ls -l
total 0
ls
EspionageBackups
sudo rm -rf
Enter password

-> nothing happened. Folders are still there :/

[slash]

I tried to see how deep into the backup folders i can get with the Terminal so I went:

cd /Volumes/Data/espionage_backup/EspionageBackups/user/-503038705
ls
SyncServices
cd SyncServices
ls
---------> this resulted in making the Time Capsule hdd start doing the noise that hdds do when you copy large files, and resulted in the Finder becoming "Application not responding"

Edit: And also, no output in the Terminal window, it just keeps going and going and going.

[slash]

Alright, I guess I'm going to create a copy of the Time Capsule hdd and then just completely erase the Time Capsule hdd and restore it form the copy.

Except you have any last advice?

[zsolt]

Hello, you say:

cd /Volumes/Data/espionage_backup/EspionageBackups/user/-503038705
ls
SyncServices
cd SyncServices
ls
---------> this resulted in making the Time Capsule hdd start doing the noise that hdds do when you copy large files, and resulted in the Finder becoming "Application not responding"

Was it the Finder which was unresponsive, or terminal?
But in fact it does not make much difference. I guess there is something wrong with the file system.
You can try to do two things:
do not cd into SyncService, just issue the rm command, i.e. when you are in

cd /Volumes/Data/espionage_backup/EspionageBackups/user/-503038705

and the ls gives SyncServices, then issue

sudo rm -rf SyncServices

or, try to run the disk utility disk repair on time capsule, and try the rm command after it...

I hope this helps.

Rgds
Zsolt