Itunes Restore button is greyed out

Since upgrading to Sierra and High Sierra I have noticed that in iTunes the Backup button is active but the Restore button is greyed out. Unfortunately I recently tried to recover an important note on my iPhone and when I discovered there was no process of doing that (unless you know to shake the iPhone to call up the "undo" option in a Note you can not un edit the note and your updates are overwritten)... I tried to restore from backup (after first Backing up the iPhone) to get back an older version of the note.

Of course you only seem to find out things are not working as you think they are after its too late to fix them...

So as you can see the iTunes recognises the iPhone (because iTunes Backup button works and iPhone Serial # read) and will allow me to "Back Up Now" but no matter what I try (restart iPhone and Mac, Start iPhone in Recovery Mode, e.t.c.) nothing will allow me to recover the iPhone from Backup unless I am prepared to totally wipe the phone to Factory Settings. Also, all the other times I have manually done a Backup are gone. Only the one completed this morning is there.

PS: As I want nothing to do with iCloud, it seems more and more synch and data backup/restore related functionality is failing on the Mac platform with every update of the OS.