Finder refresh issues and Time Machine drive icon

I had this problem and it was solved this way:

(BTW, I was using the time machine as a non-administrator account.)

Click once on the orange time machine disk icon and enter Command-I, (or right click) and select "Get info" on the drop down menu on the Time Machine HD

On the info window that opens, scroll to the bottom--- You'll see the read-write permissions for that drive. Unlock the padlock if necessary with your admin username and password and then click the + to add YOUR user name to the list or users of this drive. Make sure you select "read-write" option for your user name. Click the padlock, and your disk should change to the blue time machine and work properly.

gfs2008's answer worked for me. Thank you. ✅

(btw, my account is an admin account)

This has been driving me insane since Yosemite.

When I looked at the "get info" pane, in Sharings and Permissions there were listed:

• system
• wheel
• everyone.

(not that I have any idea what it means but it's interesting to note that "everyone" is set to ¨Read only" and NOT to "Read & Write" like the other two.

Once I followed gfs2008's instructions and added my user account (Me) and set it to "Read & Write" the icon change happened automatically after the first backup was done .... the correct behaviour for the Time Machine icon. Hallelujah!!!

... PLUS ... this also seems to have fixed the icon change on the other user account on this machine.

boblishman wrote:

When I looked at the "get info" pane, in Sharings and Permissions there were listed:

• system
• wheel
• everyone.

(not that I have any idea what it means but it's interesting to note that "everyone" is set to ¨Read only" and NOT to "Read & Write" like the other two.

That's the way it is supposed to be for a Time Machine backup volume. It is not a good idea to change it to give write permissions to anything that doesn't already have it, because that can weaken or defeat the safeguards built into the OS to protect the integrity of the Time Machine backup volume.

OS X is built on the principle of limiting access to files to the processes that need to do that. This is done through a hierarchy of users, most of them non-human system level ones, that work on the behalf of less privileged users (like human ones) to do the things they can't or shouldn't do directly. (To get an idea of all the users that run specific processes, open Activity Monitor, make sure the View menu is set to "All Processes, Hierarchically" & the User column is visible. Note that there are many users at work & that they may write to normally hidden "housekeeping" files at any time they are active.)

Proper Time Machine functioning depends on a number of these processes being controlled only by the system level users that maintain these files. Thus, users should never change permissions for anything unless they know exactly what effects that will have on the system.

I was hoping the 10.11.1 update would correct this issue, but sadly it hasn't. Manually pasting the green icon in the "get info" window for time machine is not an option for me as that totally takes away the dynamic icon ability (changing from orange to time machine after a backup has been performed).

Well, I might add that I had also decided to use Disk Utility to erase the time machine volume before making these permission changes. I basically started with a new Time Machine backup. So all folders in the Time Machine backup volume had the new, proper permissions with my user name as read-write.

If you didn't erase the volume, and just added the new permissions in the get info window, did you consider using the gear icon's drop down menu in the lower part of the window to (")make changes to all enclosed folders("). Not sure if that will help, but it might.

I'm not pretending to be a Mac guru...just offering people a solution that worked for me.

Well, as it happens, after a reboot the "non-changing icon" behaviour returned 😢 and, in view of your enlightening comments, I shall be changing things back to how they were as I would rather have a "wrong" icon than a bad backup.

This is still very annoying though and playing havoc with my OCD....almost as much as now not being able to change my alias icons 😠 ..... aaaarrggggh!

boblishman wrote:

This is still very annoying though and playing havoc with my OCD....

What works for me to change the Time Machine's desktop icon from the yellow generic one back to the blue TM one is this two part process:

1a. Launch Disk Utility. Select the startup disk from the list on the left. This is usually the first indented item named Macintosh HD. If you have selected the right item, the Mount Point shown for it in the info at the bottom of the window will be "/" (the slash mark).

1b. Click the First Aid button & the Run button that appears. Be patient while First Aid does its thing. Like with the "Verify Disk" check in the older versions of Disk Utility, your Mac will be slow or unresponsive until this process completes.

1c. When you see the Green checkmark & the Done button, click it & quit Disk Utility.

2a. Open Finder's preferences to the General tab.

2b. Click the checkbox next to "External disks" to toggle it off & then back on again. (If your Time Machine disk is an internal one, do the same for the "Hard disks" item.)

Your TM disk on the desktop should now have the correct icon. Note that this won't persist after you log out of your user account, so you would have to repeat this every time you log in.

I don't know how many users will consider this worth doing but if you are obsessive about this (& you are not alone in that respect), it should offer some relief. 🙂

What's interesting is that I just had the same reversion back to the wrong icon after a reboot too this morning. Strangely, the 'right icon" lasted several days and several reboots. That's why I posted my solution. Relaunching the Finder did bring it back once, but then I decided to use disk Utility and try Disk First Aid. Well, now the "wrong icon" won't go away with a Fnder Relaunch. So Amstel78's frustration and yours (and mine) is clearly justified.

It's easy to take away the permission change that we tried.

Apple's quality control people should focus on this. They don't read these conversations (god knows why not) so filing a bug report might be a path to a solution. Maybe they can take some people off their self-driving car project and put them back working on the computer for the rest of us.

gfs2008 wrote:

It's easy to take away the permission change that we tried.

It is easy to do for the TM volume itself, but for those that also used the "Apply to Enclosed Items..." option, there is no easy way to revert all those items to their correct permissions settings. Typically, there will be at least tens of thousands of enclosed items, & their proper permissions settings vary greatly, making almost impossible to undo all those changes.

This can cause significant problems if you use TM to restore files or folders since many of the restored items could & probably will have incorrect permissions. (Apple does provide the command line "resetpassword" tool accessible from the Recovery System, which can be used to reset Home folder permissions & ACL's, but AFAIK this only restores the proper settings for top level Home folders, not for their subfolders or the files they contain.)

This applies to anything you use the "Apply to Enclosed Items..." option on. It should never be applied to any high level folder & only to deeply nested ones if you are absolutely sure you know everything it contains should have the same permissions as the containing folder (which is very rarely the case).

I'm using two iMacs. The permissions on the Time Machine Volumes for each machine are very different, irrespective of the changes I [thought] might be a fix. But I understand your point about permissions.

I'm beta testing 10.11.2 on yet another machine. It has the same Time Machine icon problem. In fact, all my Macs and MacBooks (4) have similar Time Machine icon issues, all running El Capitan. Time Machine also seems to run into problems when the disk is full and it has to delete existing versions.)

(On that machine, it had me read-write already but didn't have the administrator as a user. Adding it changed the icon to blue, but it didn't last beyond one reboot. I thought I found an easy fix. Guess not.)

Using the Feedback Assistant for Apple's Beta program, I've sent in a detailed bug report of the problem. Feedback Assistant retrieves specific files and logs and sends them in to Apple with the report and indicating that's its a time machine issue.