Bob -
Thanks again for your prompt response and insights! See my responses inline below preceded by h>>.
Regards,
Howard
You would think that if the TC was not supported in DU it wouldn't appear, or report that it ran successfully.
Disk Utility can display the special sparsebundle image file on the Time Capsule disk, but it cannot display or check the actual Time Capsule hard drive.......named "Data" by default. Even if you have changed the name of the Time Capsule hard drive, it will not be displayed in Disk Utility. So, in the event of a possible physical problem with the hard drive on the Time Capsule, Disk Utility will be of no help.
h>> Makes sense, though the DU UI could be more explicit about its capabilities. There doesn't seem to be any physical defect on the drive, since backups from both the MacBook and my PC work fine.
Running disk verify as you suggested has eliminated the red i icon in TM Preferences (Thanks!), and entering TM shows 9 successful backups yesterday and 11 today, but the next most recent backup image before yesterday and the Latest Backup date in TM preferences still shows 12/22.
Are you saying that there are two or more sparsebundle images for the Mac on the Time Capsule? If that is the case, then Time Machine started all over again with a new backup. To possibly see the "old" backups using Time Machine, try the following:
Hold down the option key on your Mac while you click on the Time Machine "clock" icon at the top of the screen
Select Browse Other Backup Disks to see if the old backups might be there.
h>> Only one sparsebundle and one Windows backup are on the TimeCapsule. TM is accessing the single sparsebundle, as indicated by TM preferences having the correct oldest backup date of 8/8/20 and free space, and my being able to access all of those backups, as well as the backups from the "rolling" today and yesterday. The only anomaly is the continually increasing gap of missing backups from 12/22/21 to "the day before yesterday".
Finally, not sure if you were aware of the additional challenges in Time Machine with Mac's running Big Sur or Monterey. If you are using one of these operating systems, your Mac's hard drive was changed to use a new format called APFS. But, the Time Capsule hard drive can only be formatted in HFS+.
So, Time Machine tries to back up APFS formatted data to the APFS sparsebundle image file on the Time Capsule, whose hard drive can only be formatted in HFS+. Gosh, I wonder what could go wrong with this extra complexity.
h>> Never a dull moment with "improved" file formats and software versions! ;-) We replaced our 2013 x86 MBP with this M1 Mac Air in Nov 2020, which I believe included Big Sur, and if it didn't I would have updated it as soon as it was stable. TC has been working fine for both the old and new Macs and the PC as I updated the OSs over the years, and worked for both read and writing backups through 12/22/21. It's just this growing gap in accessing backups over two days old since 12/22 that has been puzzling me.
Personally, Time Machine backing up to a Time Capsule has not been all that reliable for me since Big Sur was introduced. I keep a Time Capsule around to help answer questions on this support forum, but I do not trust it as my primary backup plan.
h>> While I'm sure I will need to replace it eventually, the TC has actually been pretty reliable for me. I did replace the disk a few years ago, but other than that it's actually been pretty good. I have it connected via Gbe to my router with the TC wifi disabled, so using it only as a network drive. TC is our local backup, but we also back up all our devices to the cloud.