Time Machine: old backups are not deleted and cannot be accessed

Dialabrain, thanks for your question. If there was a reason, would it have any bearing on my problem?

Presumably Time Machine should work in 10.13.1 just the same as it works in the earlier versions, or am I missing something?

If not, perhaps you could expand in more than a sentence why not?

Thanks

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't seen a Time Machine issue mentioned in any of the updates since my current version. As you can see, it's also a pretty fundamental problem - not minor, which is why I doubt it will be fixed by updating. In fact, it could complicate the issue: I've read that Time Machine will not touch old backups made on a previous OS. That's why I mentioned the fact that I haven't updated it.

Thanks for your input, dialabrain.

For anyone else who happens to read this, the fact that there is "nothing selected" in the screenshot is exactly the problem. As mentioned above, "All windows apart from ‘Today’ are grey with no dates and cannot be selected." The windows do not respond when clicked and neither do the dates up the right hand side.

Yes, there are more backups right up until this month (Jan 2020).

As mentioned at the start, my main issue is that Time Machine is not deleting old back ups to make room as it's meant to. Whether you have cause to do it or not, the fact that nothing can be selected once you 'Enter Time Machine' suggests there's a problem somewhere!

Thanks for the tip, BDAqua. Sounds interesting. I'll give it a shot and let you know what happens.

Need to clear some space on my Mac first though. Capacity squeezed all over right now!

Did you also have a problem with TM not deleting old backups to free up space by any chance?