I'm running high sierra 10.13.6 and the restore option in time machine is greyed out.
I can see the back up files in the finder window when searching the external drive but when entering time machine everything be hide the first window is grey and all options to restore is greyed out.
Apple Care said to reinstall High Siera but after doing that,,,,,,,,nothing has changed.
iMac, macOS Sierra (10.12.6)
I talked to apple senior advisors again and after more exploratory efforts by advisors,He was stumped...
they are sending it to engineering department to get back to me . .
thanks for your information,But I think everything is set up as it should be...
Was High Sierra installed on an SSD? If it is installed on an SSD, but the backup is created on a hard drive, there may be some confusion as to the formatting of the drive.
High Sierra automatically updates SSDs to APFS when it installs.
The Time Machine hard drive actually stores the backups in individual folders arranged by time stamp on the backup drive. You could manually use EasyFind or FindAnyFile to locate a file in the backup and copy it to your original.
The other possibility is it is in the middle of a backup. Check the status of Apple Menu -> system preferences -> Time machine to make sure that is not the case. Turn on manual backups if it is automatically backing up. And then use the menubar icon for Time Machine to backup when you have time to make an updates archive.
Spotlight helps Time Machine search files. If Spotlight indexing is updating in the Spotlight menu, that could delay access to your Time Machine backup as well. Your Apple menu -> system preferences -> Spotlight can be adjusted to set certain folders to "privacy" to avoid this problem.
Similarly if you use iCloud Drive, it may be backing up certain folders simultaneously to Time Machine. This creates a conundrum of figuring whose backup is most current. The larger your iCloud Drive, the harder to sort that out.
How can I restore the greyed out option in time machine.
