You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Time Machine can't access previous backups.

I am running Time Machine on an ugraded Mac Pro 2012, running Mac OS 10.14.6 Mojave. I have Time Machine running saving to an 6TB External Drive.

The Backups are running fine, and I can navigate the drive perfectly fine. But when I open Time Machine and try to use the Time Machine Restore interface ("Star wars" screen), I can only access the "Now" state – the very first pane, or current state. I cannot scroll back to previous backups, using either the arrow buttons, or the right edge time indicators.

This is a new-to-me machine but everything seems in order. The external is connected via USB 3, is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GIUD Partition Map - recommended for TM. On previous machines I've had to wait a few minuites wjile TM indexed the backups, but waiting a while didn't seem to do anything. I've no idea.

Weird. And frustrating.

Mac Pro, macOS 10.14

Posted on Mar 9, 2020 9:12 PM

Top-ranking reply

Kurt Griffith Author

Level 1

31 points

Posted on Mar 10, 2020 9:39 AM

I figured it out.

Time Machine had auto-excluded my internal HDD RAID Drive and only backed up the SSD - the RAID was set for HFS case-sensitive and the TM drive was not. Apparently they have to match. Since I have cloud backup with Backblaze - it was a small sacrifice to re-format the Time Machine drive and start over. The supplied utility formatted the drive as not case sensitive. The clue was viewing files in TM on the SSD drive did access backups, but files/folders located on the RAID did not, even though the side indicator showed backups available - just not for those locations.

Start over. Functioning nominally now. But I had to toss about a week of backups, but not that heinous since it was only the Boot SSD that had been backed up.

For the most part I do grok Apple's mania for UI simplicity - but there is stuff I wish would get flagged up front when you're setting things up, not after something FAILS. It's a little short of "it just works" More like "mostly."

View in context

Time Machine can't access previous backups.

Similar questions