black screen time machine mavericks

I want to share my experience.

I have two monitors. I had experienced same problem with you, especially keynote.

Fortunately, I found temporary solution.

1. Open new keynote and locate it second monitor.

2. Acitivate orignial keynote to use Time Machine on first monitor.

3. Run Time Machine.

Time machine might work well.

Just in my case, it works well for keynote.

Enjoy.

I had the same problem with TimeMachine on my iMAC 24" with a second 24" display.

The solution you recommend (Mission Control preference pane: Uncheck 'Displays have separate Spaces' ) is perfect, since unplugging the second display to use TimeMachine is not really a solution.

I thank you very much.

I have sourced another solution to this problem...

Thanks to Chris Jennings on another forum. All you need to do is... move the Finder window to the second display and then invoke TimeMachine from there, TimeMachine will still appear on the primary (iMac) display but without the big black box over the top of the interface. However, very strangely, doing that results in a long delay (30 seconds?) before your mouse clicks will be recognized – at which point all of your cued up mouse clicks fire in rapid succession. But better than nothing.

This is still not fixed on Mavericks 10.9.3 .... ➖

If you have this issue using Yosemite, i found a turn around:

1. Go to Preferences - Mission Control

2. Uncheck "Displays have separate Spaces"

3. logout and login

This will fix Time Machine to display black screen in one monitor. The side effect of this is you loose the abilitty to use monitors as separate spaces but isn't that bad.

I recently upgraded to El Capitan, and after a power outage needed to restore a corrupted database to one from before it crashed. I ran into the Black Screen problem and none of the other workarounds fixed it. Physically turning off the second monitor worked, I restored the file, turned the second monitor back on and all is good. Time Machine is still broken with 2 monitors though.

In case it matters I have 27 inch iMac and a 21 inch (I think) Dell so they're different sizes. The black screen section on the iMac is the size of the 2nd monitor, with some partially visible Time Machine windows behind it. Using the up and down arrows I can select files because the info shows up down below and then restore one, but it's awkward to say the least. I can use the hashes on the right to select different backups. When I close Time Machine I get a new finder window on the iMac, open to the Desktop, and the size of the other monitor.

I just ran into this same problem again and it's been long enough since it last happened that I had to go search out the solution again. cyberjunkiefreak's solution works just fine, much safer than physically turning off the second monitor. The second monitor does go black when Time Machine is open but the primary monitor and Time Machine work perfectly. Thanks. Hopefully this fix will mean I won't have that problem again, and Apple will get this sorted out soon.

Thanks!!! I was pretty sure the dual monitors were not the problem as I have been using them and time machine through several iterations of OS X without a problem. When I saw this post I remembered I had set finder to only one space a few weeks back. Set it back to "all spaces" and it's fixed. Now, apple needs to fix this bug. Thanks for the help!

Thanks, that worked for me perfectly!