Hi everyone,
I’m in a desperate situation and hoping someone has experienced something similar.
Setup: WD My Cloud Home (single drive, 6TB), device name MyCloud-22ASTD. Three Time Machine backups stored: iMac 27" Late 2015 (~2TB), plus two MacBook Air backups.
What happened:
- March 24-25: I was migrating data from the iMac Time Machine backup to a fresh macOS install using Migration Assistant. The process failed multiple times (system rebooted mid-transfer).
- March 25 evening: The sparsebundles were STILL VISIBLE via Finder. I could browse inside “iMac de Dan.sparsebundle” and see the bands folder with thousands of 268 MB band files, all with recent dates.
- March 26: The TimeMachineBackup share now appears COMPLETELY EMPTY. Only .DS_Store visible. All three sparsebundles gone.
Critical detail: The device still shows ~741 GB used out of 5.95 TB. The data is physically still there.
What I’ve tried:
- Browsing via Finder from two different Macs (iMac + MacBook Air)
- Terminal: ls, find, hdiutil attach - all say files don’t exist
- tmutil setdestination + listbackups - “no machine directory found”
- Rebooting the NAS multiple times
- home.mycloud.com shows personal files but zero Time Machine content
- Local device web interface has no file browser
My theory: The My Cloud Home firmware is hiding/filtering the sparsebundles from the SMB share listing, possibly due to a corrupted Time Machine service state after the failed migrations.
Questions:
- Has anyone recovered hidden Time Machine sparsebundles from a My Cloud Home?
- Is SSH access possible on My Cloud Home to browse the internal filesystem directly?
- Has anyone successfully extracted the physical drive and mounted it on another system?
- Is there a way to reset/restart the Time Machine service on the My Cloud Home without erasing data?
Any help is hugely appreciated. This backup contains years of irreplaceable family photos and documents.
Thanks,
Dan
