Ubuntu / Apple :: Script To Deal With Pseudo-hardlinked Directories In Time Machine Backups

Just wanted to share a script that I wrote to migrate data off of a Time Machine backup. As anyone who's tried this knows, it's not straightforward because most directories are pseudo-hardlinked according to some hare-brained scheme Apple came up with. (Hard-linked directories actually show up as zero-length regular files with bizarre link counts greater than 128. The link count corresponds to a directory called "dir_$N" (where $N is the link count) inside of a special directory at the root of the Time Machine volume called ".HFS+ Private Directory Data^M" (where the ^M is a literal carriage-return character).)

Here's the script (it's also attached, for convenience). It works pretty much the same as "rsync -av <SRC_DIR> <DST_DIR>" would, if the pseudo-hardlinks weren't in the way. In other words, it just recursively copies the first directory to the second. So the first argument (the source directory) is typically something like

/media/<TIME_MACHINE_VOLNAME>/Backups.backupdb/<HOSTNAME>/Latest/<VOLNAME>

if you want the entire latest backup. It can also be a relative path, if you've already changed to a directory inside the backup.

[Code]....