Poiks2 wrote:
I made the decision (you might say, the mistake) of using three different devices as Time Machine backup drives.
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
Between the three drives, I have backups going all the way back to 2020, and my sense is that the Time Machine app on the Mac wasn't designed to so many backups, or perhaps it's the use of multiple backup drives that is causing issues.
That's not very old for Time Machine. It can handle much more than that.
When I try to use the app to restore a file, the menu on the right is useless, and trying to navigate through the backups using the arrow buttons also doesn't work right. One click and it goes from today to 2021.
It sounds like one or more of your external drives is failing or too slow for use.
I want to delete my older backups and slim down to only use one backup device. How can I delete the old backups? I've seen references to deleting from within the app, but I don't see how to do that. Does the Mac maintain a catalog of old backups that needs to be maintained, or does it populated the backup catalog every time you load the app?
If you want to reset one of the drives, just erase it in Disk Utility.
I recommend reviewing each of the external drives and their connection to your computer. It sounds like one or more of them is simply too slow. This could be cause by any number of problems. Maybe you have an ancient USB 2.0 hub in the mix somewhere. Or maybe one of your drives is too old and is failing. Or maybe one of your drives is too new and it's one of those junk new drives whose performance is indistinguishable from a failed drive.
It takes some work these days to find a decent hard drive. You need a good enclosure, which itself is hard to find. USB 3.0 is adequate for Time Machine, but you do have to check. The shape of the plug is irrelevant. Sometimes when they say "USB 3.0 compatible" or "Thunderbolt 3" compatible, they literally mean the shape of the plug and it is USB 2.0. Actual Thunderbolt is very rare. Thunderbolt 2 is almost non-existent. You will only find Thunderbolt 3 on new, bus-powered SSDs, and true Thunderbolt versions are, again, extremely rare and hard to find.
The easiest solution is a Samsung T7 or similar. It is a USB 3.2 SSD with decent speed and decent price. Actual mechanical hard drives will work fine with Time Machine, but you have to find a good one. Look for a 6 GB/s 7200 RPM drive. If it doesn't explicitly say either of those two values, then it isn't. It's total junk. Put a drive like that into a fancy USB 3.2 interface and it runs at USB 2.0 speed.
