When I said to find the folder using Finder, I should have added "on the boot drive, never on the Time Machine drive." The structure of a Time Machine backup set is VERY complex with all kinds of hard links going forward and backward in time/the backup data set.
To me, putting a functional drive with a corrupted/damaged Time Machine backup in a closet would be pointless. While it may contain files that you wish you could recover, recovery would be a crap shoot at best. Personally I would erase the drive and start over with a fresh Time Machine backup set and hope that I hadn't lost anything critical.
I had to do that a few years ago. Since then I have two separate drives I use for Time Machine backups and TM automatically alternates between them. If either drive fails or the backup set on it becomes corrupted, the other drive/backup set is at most an hour older or newer. I might lose one hour of backup data, but no more. When I enter Time Machine the existence of the two data sets is totally transparent and TM sees the pair as a seamless whole. I suppose Time Machine would support adding a third or fourth drive but my data is not THAT critical.
As to the server issue, my posts over the past few days have been going through pretty normally. Of course that could change with the next post. The hardest bugs to eradicate are intermittent.
