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Brand new time machine set up, weird gray text, un-selectable files.

Just got a new external hard drive for time machine back ups. Set it up and went into it via the Time Machine interface and the text in the finder window is all gray and in separate boxes and nothing is selectable. The disk was formatted fresh before I set it up and is brand new so it has no older time machine back ups associated with it. I still have the old time machine drive and hooked it up and it has the same problem which I never noticed (I don't think I've ever had to actually retrieve anything from it). Looking at the drive itself via Finder the files are all there and have been backed up, the interface is just wonky. Any ideas?




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Posted on Apr 21, 2013 10:06 PM

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Apr 21, 2013 10:26 PM in response to pantsonsteven

Try toggling your view arrangement. To do this, click the toolbar menu that looks like six boxes below a line (next to the four view option buttons), and choose "None." Then see if this helps. If not, then try removing the hidden .DS_Store files for the affected directories. You can use a tool like BlueHarvest to remove all the .DS_Store files from one or all directories in your system: http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest4/


When done, try toggling a backup and then see if the first backup instance still shows this behavior.

Brand new time machine set up, weird gray text, un-selectable files.

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