It CAN be read from linux (By using Ubuntu for example) but it is a tough nut to crack. Windows can't do it at all.
Apparently, you need to be logged in as root to do the below, so first make sure you have a password set for root. If you don't, execute on the shell:
sudo passwd root
and enter a password for root. With the password set, execute:
sudo -i
to get a root shell.
The following came from http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080623213342356
It turns out Apple does a couple slick
things with the file system to make
incremental backups work, including
hard linking to directories, which
isn't allowed in Linux. So for anyone
that needs to access their Time
Machine from something other than its
associated Mac, here's how you do
it...
1 - Mount the drive. On linux, it should automount if you have
gnome-volume-manager installed. If you
don't see it in /media, then run
nautilus and check the desktop. Still
don't see it? Read man mount. And then
don't forget the -t hfsplus flag.
2 - Change directory. My mount point is /media/Time Machine/. Within that
path, I find the directory
Backups.backupdb. This represents the
directory layout of your backup
system. Inside that directory is the
name of your disk. Inside that are
folders labeled with dates
corresponding to each incremental
backup that was made. Pick the one you
want, or choose the Latest symlink.
For example, my path is now:
/media/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/Drive 1/2008-06-05-073745
3 - Find your file's folder. Within that path is a complete representation
of your filesystem. Navigate to the
location of your file. If it's not too
big or nested too deep, it may be
plainly visible. However, there's a
good chance that its parent directory
doesn't exist. Instead you'll see a
zero-byte file for the parent that
takes its name and acts as a pointer.
Run ls -l and take note of the first
numbered column. Example:
...
-r--r--r-- 2155704 root 5791966 0 2007-06-25 02:54 Wallpaper
-r--r--r-- 2155725 root 5791967 0 2007-06-25 02:54 Web-Identity
-r--r--r-- 5441953 root 5791968 0 2007-06-25 02:54 Windows
-r--r--r-- 5511926 root 5791969 0 2007-06-25 02:54 Work
After the permissions, you'll see the
directory number that typically refers
to the number of directories within
that folder. For a file, it should
always be 1, but here it is not. What
Apple has done is adjust the
information in this file's inode to
use it as a pointer to the directory
that contains the actual file. That
way, multiple revisions of the same
drive can coexist without duplicating
data.
4 - Find the data. In my case, I want to grab something out of the Wallpaper
folder. First I made a note of the
directory number, 2155704, and then
did cd /media/Time Machine/.HFS+
Private Directory Data -- this is
where the data really lives. From
there, I just did cd dir_2155704, and
voilĂ !
