Time Machine "Star Wars" interface does not scroll back or show dates

the fact that you mention a sparse bundle tells me that the backups were originally made over network and you later moved the drive to be directly attached to the computer, correct? remote backups are stored in sparse bundles but directly attached ones aren't. they are normally stored directly in a folder on the TM drive. however, when you move a remote backup to be directly attached as you did, TM continues using the sparse bundle. this appears to be a bug to me. but when you try to enter TM interface it does not know to mount the bundle first as it's normally not required for directly attached backups. so your options are
1. mount the sparse bundle by hand by double-clicking on it before entering TM interface. then it will work.
2. move the drive back to be accessed over network.
3. reformat the drive and restart the backups on a directly attached drive. no sparse bundle will be created and TM will work as it should.

Ohucan2 wrote:
You are correct. I had this Lacie attached to my airport but then moved it directly to my machine, where I prefer it to stay. I am unclear on your first fix. When I double on the sparse bundle I see a disk image, named bankups, double click, shows my computer folder, double click shows all the back up folders. Can I open the sparse bundle "permanently" by opening it and dragging the folders outside of it but within the hard drive?

NO! don't do that. never drag anything from the sparse bundle via finder!

Or will I always have to open the sparse bundle to view data if I don't so your suggested 2 or 3.

what I meant is this once you double-click on the sparse bundle to mount it you can now click on TM in the dock and you'll see the past history and be able to access it. try it. but there is actually yet another option. you can restore the bundle to a partition on the drive. add a new partition to the external or use a different drive. then start disk utility and drag the sparse bundle to the left pane. make sure the sparse bundle is not mounted, select it in DU and click on the restore tab. drag the sparse bundle to the source field and the partition you want to restore to to the target field. check the box to erase destination and click "restore". this will restore the bundle to the partition. you can then trash the bundle and use the restore partition as the TM drive.

->restore tab. drag the sparse bundle to the

Many thanks.

Ohucan2 wrote:
I thought I understood, but I don't. First off, if I open the sparse bundle and then enter Time Machine, it still will not scroll back.

I don't know why that is.

I have to open each folder to view contents. Secondly, I assume I use disk utility to partition the drive per your suggestion. Will this erase the data?

not if you do it correctly. provided you have enough space you can split an existing partition in two without erasing any data. enter 'create new volumes" in disk utility help for instructions.

Is another option to copy the sparse bundle to another drive, erase this drive, then restore it back the way you described?

yes, absolutely. that might be a better option if you have another drive to use. every partitioning operation as described above is risky. plus it can fail if you don't have enough free space and the disk is too fragmented. just copy the sparse bundle to the other drive, reformat this one and restore.

I'd like to restore this as soon as possible to I don't keep backing up to the sparse bundle. Thanks.

Hi - I have a followup question in regard to this. I have had lots of problems using TM with my airport so I have decided to hardwire my external HD for TM backups. I finally realized why I could not see any backups when I went to "Star Wars" after reading your post tonight. So I dragged two sparsebundles (one that contains previous TM backups for my laptop and one with my desktop backups) from the HD to my desktop and they seem to have copied appropriately (they are the right size and when I open each of them I see the folders I expect to see). I have erased and formatted my HD (into two partitions - one for laptop, one for desktop). I tried to Restore based on our instructions but first I got an error message saying "the source image needs to be imagescanned before it can be restored". So I highlighted one of the sparsbundles in the left hand column of Disk Utility and went to Images/Scan Images for Restore and I get this error: "Unable to scan 'JManheims MacBook Pro.sparsebundle.' (Invalid Argument)". Do you know what this is about and what I need to do??
Thanks
Jon