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I use Time Machine with a NAS. It works well and it mounts a disk image when doing backup or when I enter Time Machine.

When the disk image is mounted, I can access all the directories of my backups.

However, I can't mount the disk image from the sparse bundle. If I try to mount it, Finder shows an error after few minutes (I don't know what is the exact name of the error in English).

Is there a simple way to overcome this drawback?

I have a WD My Cloud EX2 NAS and a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

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  • What exactly are you trying to do by mounting the sparsebundle?
    – perhapsmaybeharry
    Jun 10, 2016 at 9:21
  • @perhapsmaybeharry I'd like to copy some files from the backup, without using time machine.
    – sandoval31
    Jun 11, 2016 at 19:07

4 Answers 4

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To mount your .sparsebundle (requires command line), try

hdiutil mount /path/to/sparsebundle

Ensure that your EX2 is mounted as a network share on your Mac. Usually, this will involve mounting your Time Machine share to reveal your .sparsebundle.

Be aware that this will take a substantial amount of time depending on the size of your .sparsebundle.

side note: I tried mounting my sparsebundle on the WD My Cloud I backup to, and it seems that there isn't really much of an issue except for the sluggishness of browsing. Could you post the issue you're facing in your native language?

By the way, to find files in the sparsebundle, navigate to

*.sparsebundle/Backups.backupdb/[name of your computer]/Latest
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The OP wanted to browse the TM backup without TM so this doesn't apply but I found this thread when I was trying to access my old TM backup. Here is my solution:

Expanding on @Mic Channel comment

In System Preferences -> Time Machine, make sure "show time machine in menu bar" is selected. Then Alt-click the time machine icon in the menu bar and choose "browse other backup disks". Find your old Time Machine volume and restore selected files.

Like the OP, I also couldn't see my mycloud TM drive initially. These steps fixed it for me:

  1. I logged in to mycloud.local with my admin password and turned off "enable time machine backups". this stops the TM services and makes the drive available to other processes. I diagnosed this because I couldn't mount the sparsebundle with hdiutil mount - ["resources busy" error] (Sparse bundle on NAS - can't open "Resource temporarily unavailable").

  2. Go to Network and mount the network location "mycloud". make sure you connect with your username and password with which the TM backup was created.

  3. click on "Time Machine Backup" and make sure it mounts as a drive.

  4. Now go to the Time Machine program and "Browse other backup disks" and your backup computer's name should be there

I found going through the TM interface easier than trying to find my file manually because the different snapshots only have the changed files.

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If I understand your question correctly, you don't need to mount anything to get to your backups, use Time Machine's Enter Time Machine function and it will mount the backups for you. The file structure isn't really designed for direct access. If you have any problems connecting to the MyCloud try connecting as Guest, no password.

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  • Yes it works. I can also connect to Mycloud in smb, but as I said, I can't mount sparsebundle. The problem is that I'm about to reinstall my system (without time machine), and I will like to access particular files to backup them. So it would be safer and also more practical to access the files directly.
    – sandoval31
    Mar 11, 2015 at 7:00
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    If you choose to do a clean reinstall of your system without using Time Machine or Migration Assistant, you should still be able to access the old Time Machine backup on your external Time Machine volume / disk. In System Preferences -> Time Machine, make sure "show time machine in menu bar" is selected. Then Alt-click the time machine icon in the menu bar and choose "browse other backup disks". Find your old Time Machine volume and restore selected files.
    – Mic Channel
    Jun 10, 2016 at 12:17
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    @ Mic Channel. Time machine does not show my backup when I use "browse other backup disks".
    – sandoval31
    Jun 11, 2016 at 19:10
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It seems the problem is coming from the finder. When I relaunch it (regularly), I can access the content of the .sparsebundle file.

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