Early last year my laptop crashed. Thankfully I have a Time Machine of that disk, but my laptop was so out of date, I can't restore the Time Machine to my current OS. Still, I have all the files the Time Machine created on the external drive.

I'm trying to see if I can use iMessage-exporter to copy over my messages database with attachments from that external drive. When I run a command like this:

imessage-exporter -d -p /Volumes/My\ Book/Backups.backupdb/MacBook\ Pro\ \(7\)/2025-01-24-180205/Macintosh\ HD/Users/XXXX/Library/Messages/chat.db -r /Volumes/My\ Book/Backups.backupdb/MacBook\ Pro\ \(7\)/2025-01-24-180205/Macintosh\ HD/Users/XXXX/Library/Messages/Attachments/

I do get it to return diagnostic information, but as you can see, it reports that 100% of the files are missing, even though in the attachments folder, I can see the attachments there. Is there any hope I can get the exporter to see those files?

iMessage Database Diagnostics

Handle diagnostic data:
    Total handles: 1012
    Handles with more than one ID: 361
    Total duplicated handles: 126
Message diagnostic data:
    Total messages: 215665
    Messages not associated with a chat: 2448
    Messages belonging to more than one chat: 141
Attachment diagnostic data:
    Total attachments: 17281
        Data referenced in table: 25.78 GB
        Data present on disk: 1.39 MB
    Missing files: 17277 (100%)
        No path provided: 3
        No file located: 17274
Thread diagnostic data:
    Total chats: 1235
    Total duplicated chats: 10
Global diagnostic data:
    Total database size: 232.82 MB
    Handles with resolved names: 296/886 (33%)