Can´t find "old backups" (one week old) on Time Machine

Archive is easy to do.. plug the USB drive into the Time Capsule USB port. (If not hfs+ format plug it into your computer first and format it Mac OS extended journaled.)

Open Airport utility and go to disk tab.. select archive disk under the Partitions box.

Once you start archive it does not need any more interaction. The TC will not accept backups while archiving but you should have already turned off Time Machine. It can still work as a router in the network.

The job takes from 24-36 hours depending on all sorts of factors.. but expect a full day. You will see a progress bar as it is working.

Once it completes the archive you do at least have a backup.

The way forward from that point is to upgrade the computer back to Catalina.

Then i erased the disk because it was really slow and i wanted to clean up everytinhig.

Here is the rub. Catalina performs poorly on mechanical hard disks particularly slower 2.5" laptop style.

Is your 2012 laptop running an SSD?

I am guessing you have a 1TB or larger drive in the Macbook.. otherwise you could not fit in 500GB worth of photos and videos.

What I suggest if you have 2012 laptop with mechanical disk is take it to the shop and get it upgraded to 1TB SSD. Supply them with the backup of the TC on USB drive and get them to recover from the backup to a date before you erased the drive. You will need to clearly state the date. Make sure they hand you the original drive.

IMHO the performance of Catalina on a machine of that age even with SSD will not make you happy. So if you already have an SSD in it, then I would suggest creating for yourself the system drive before this mess started. It is easy to do. However you will need external 3.5" fast mechanical drive or SSD. Boot the hard disk to recovery and use the Time Machine System to go back to before you started messing around.. and do a full recovery not to the boot drive.. (you need to back this up carefully before you start) but to the external drive. This will take several hours. Once you have this recovery it should be selectable to boot the laptop and you can then archive properly all your personal folders.

I can point to other posts with lots more details if all that sounds too much..

None of your data is going to be harmed doing any of this.. you have already archived the backup. Since the size is very large I would be 90% certain you are going to recover ok. All you need is the right setup.

You certainly can upgrade the laptop back to Catalina and then try again to open the backup even from Finder. That might be easier for you to do.. although I prefer the recovery method since that takes you back to original working boot drive before the mess started.

If you erased your Mac's hard drive and installed a new operating system, you have in effect, a "new" Mac. Time Machine cannot "see" the backups that were made on your "old" Mac because it can only read the backups that were made using the same Mac.

In other words, if you bought a brand new Mac, it could not "read" the Time Machine backups of your "old" Mac......because it did not make them.

You will need to use Migration Assistant on your "new" Mac to transfer data from a Time Machine backup of your "old" Mac. This Apple Support document will go over the details of how to do this.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204350

Not sure what to suggest at this point since we provided the same answer that you would have received from Apple Support. I assume that you hare restarted the hard drive

I'm not recommending this......because it is easy to corrupt your old backups......but if you want to try it. what happens when you open up the sparsebundle file for the "old" Mac?

Take us through each step, and what happens after each step, as we cannot see your screen, so things that are obvious to you are unknown to us.

Were the Time Machine backups of the "old" Mac encrypted? If they were, you will need the password that you used to set up the encryption for the backups. This is very likely a different password than you used for the Time Capsule base station or device password.

There should be two different sparsebundle files on the Time Capsule disk.....one for your "old" Mac and another for the "new" Mac with the operating system that was just installed awhile ago.

I am starting to worry that the old backup file has become corrupted. If it is, it probably would not appear when you try to open The Time Capsule disk using the Finder......even though the file might be taking up a significant amount of space on the Time Capsule disk.

Unfortunately, I cannot create this type of issue here. We'll have to wait to see if another user will respond who can help.

You need to preserve what you have so it is not lost.

Stop using Time Machine NOW.

Get a suitably sized USB drive and using the Airport Utility archive the TC. Depending on the amount of files on the TC and how full it is this can take up to a day or more.

Tell us precisely what you did. In order.

Every step from the computer working away happily on its previous OS (yosemite??) to running on your current High Sierra.

I also want to know if the USB drive you mentioned in the first post is a proper image of the drive.. if so all your troubles are over.

bootable usb drive with yosemite

Tell us how you made this and does it include all the files on the computer before you started this process?

In the second post after Bob explained you need to use migration assistant.. you stated.

I already did that but the only backups that appeared are from today :(

Migration Assistant causes all kinds of issues. The only date you can select for migration is the current backup so the reference to only backups today appeared does not make sense. Migration Assistant would / should hopefully transfer all your files from previous computer configuration to new one.

But this is where things go wrong... A full Migration will make the computer adopt the old Time Machine backup and the first backup after migration can very well destroy the original backup. Did any message come up about if you wished to adopt or use the old backup at any point?

Did you use the exact name for the first user as was used on the previous computer? That will also lead to problems.

Were all the old videos (500GB worth) actually sitting on the computer in your user folders before you started upgrade?

You cannot recover them from Time Machine if you did not have them on the disk beforehand?

Tell us exactly how they were stored if not on the machine?

Tell us how much freespace there is on the TC disk? The disk tab from Airport Utility will tell you this.

Assuming this is a Gen5 AC model TC do the archive to a suitable USB HFS+ formatted drive. If the TC is 2TB then you need 2TB USB.. if it is 3TB you need 3TB USB.. minimum .. it can of course be larger.

This is IMPORTANT, ESSENTIAL and should have been done before you started. Your 500GB of videos etc are seriously at risk.

Once you have archive you can plug it directly to the computer and check.. we can also fix permissions.. which I am seriously hoping is the main problem.

Please NOTE for the future.. NEVER EVER trust Time Machine again.

A bootable clone of the computer onto a USB drive and none of this would be a problem. That is why I was hoping you did a proper clone. Also videos and photos should be separately backed up to multiple locations.. as separate files. They can never be replaced.

After you do the archive post back for more details.. You will need yet another USB drive of size equal to the boot drive and it is possible you can do a full restore of the original disk before this mess started. You will need to boot to the recovery partition and use setup assistant. This has got several people out of trouble.

NOTE.. you cannot read Time Machine backup if you were on a later OS and restored an earlier version.. Time Machine backups from Mojave and especially Catalina are totally invisible to High Sierra.. you can only go forward not backwards.. that is so so important to understand.