Apartment Fire- Time Machine did not back up XCode projects?

Question

My apartment burned down a few days ago and my beloved MacBook Pro was one of the many electronic casualties. While I of course back up (using Time Machine) and my backup drive managed to survive, much to my dismay many of the most important files seem to be missing from my Time Machine backups. Namely, all of my recent XCode projects. In fact, the entire directory (titled "Re-Programming") which housed all of my development projects is inexplicably missing from my latest backups.

Curiously, it seems that some of my older backups do contain the missing folder (May 10 has the folder, while May 19 through the latest do not).

I would have wanted to try Migration Assistant to bring my files over to a friend's computer but I'm unable to because my backups were made in Lion and he is using Snow Leopard. I'm fairly certain it wouldn't help though (not only is the directory missing, but a search for certain header files I remember the filename of don't show up in Search).

I've done some googling and it seems Time Machine does not backup XCode build folders to save space. This makes sense as it would take up a lot of space and are easily recreated by building your projects. But why on earth would Time Machine not backup my oh-so-important XCode project files?

The plot thickens though. Even if, for some strange reason Time Machine has a bug that prevents it from backing up XCode projects, what about other projects? I had some Android projects in there too, maybe even some old HTML/CSS/PHP happenings. What happened to those, and why the ENTIRE directory, not just the XCode projects? And why did it USED TO backup my most important directory and suddenly stopped without my knowledge back in May?

Am I missing something here? Perhaps they were placed in a weird place that isn't obvious to me? Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Sorry to hear that. I believe TimeMachine backups are just a .sparsebundle files. You should be able to mount the file directly and browse through it to see if you can find any of your project files.

Answer 2

https://superuser.com/questions/147998/backing-up-my-xcode-projects

I am not sure about Time Machine but here are some alternatives!