Time Machine backups not visible

I've got a problem where Time Machine does backups like it should, but when I enter into Time Machine to view my backups, none of them are visible. Its a bit odd... in Time Machine I see bars on the right (indicating the backups) but there are no dates listed next to the bars (apart from the one at the bottom that says "Now"). If I move my mouse over the bars, they expand to indicate that I'm selecting them, but clicking has no effect.
I have seen this notice from Apple regarding the problem:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1760?viewlocale=en_US
When I first set things up, I had spaces in my computer's name... but Time Machine worked back then. At some point I changed the computer name to a name that did not have spaces and contained only characters that were with Apple's designated list. I've never gone into Time Machine to view backups since I've done that until yesterday, so I don't know when my problem started happening.
I've tried renaming my computer name back to the original name (with the spaces) just to see if the backups would show up again. No luck. I've now renamed my computer back to a name with no spaces to fall under Apple's guidelines. Still no luck.
One thing that is interesting is that I can manually mount the sparsebundle image and see all of the backups and the files that are in there. It does indeed look like the backup part is working.
I've run Disk Utility's repair on both the external drive and the disk image and they seem to be in good shape.
I'm considering just reformatting my drive and starting the backups all over from scratch, but this seems to be a drastic approach. Further, it lowers my confidence in relying on Time Machine. Any suggestions on how I might fix this?

I have a similar problem, my computer name has non ASCII characters, the backups are there but don't show up when I time travel. I need to get some files from one of the backups, so I can't just reformat and begin again, but your message makes it seem that changing my computer name to a valid name won't allow me to access the backups that were made with the invalid name.
It would be nice if the Apple document you reference would give some help to solve the problem rather than just tell us what we did wrong.
Surely there is a way to access the backups that are on the drive.

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Hello everyone,
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Thanks!
VIkki

Yes, that's option B as she still has the IMac but I'm curious as to why the TM backup isn't working - just in case I need to do this on another machine down the road, it would be nice to know what's going wrong with the more convenient TM restore option.... Thanks!

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Hi,
I want to recover from a Time Machine backup but the external HD where it was stored now shows empty (1TB available) and the name 'backup' has been replaced by 'untitled'. It was fine yesterday. How do I get my backup back? Is there external software I can use, something throught Terminal?
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Yes, that's option B as she still has the IMac but I'm curious as to why the TM backup isn't working - just in case I need to do this on another machine down the road, it would be nice to know what's going wrong with the more convenient TM restore option.... Thanks!

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I had the same problem due to the Fire Wire port. Apple tested it told me it is OK!, I tried a new cable, and have tested both ports on my back up device. I find it strange that as soon as I installed Mavericks. The drive does work using USB. It could be a coincidence, I don't absolutely know at this point, my back up drive ports could stop working, but I doubt it!

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Reboot the TC.. this is most common issue since Mountain Lion.
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Time machine - backup not found yet visible

Hello,
I am having trouble setting up Time Machine on a new Macbook Air running OSX Yosemite 10.10.
I have an external hard drive connected to a first generation Airport Extreme, and it is running fine and backing up on my other computer, a MacBook Pro which is running OS X version 10.7.5 and AirPort Utility 6.3.1.
Yet when I purchased the new Macbook Air (listed above), which is using Airport Utility 6.3.4, upon opening Time Machine, it is not able to see my backup disk. It just keeps saying "Set up an AirPort Time Capsule that is not listed here." When I click "Setup" it brings me to the AirPort Utility, and I can see my AirPort Extreme, and further, when I click on my AirPort Extreme and "Edit" I am able to see my backup drive under the "Disks" header. There is plenty of space as well.
Any reason why Time Machine is not able to see my backup disk, despite being able to see it in AirPort Utility? I As I said, it is working fine on the MacBook Pro.
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Apple never officially supported Time Machine backups to a drive connected to the USB port of the AirPort Extreme, Generations 1 through 5.
Some users were able to make this work, and some were not up using operating systems up through Mountain Lion (10.8.x).
Apple pretty much shut off the capability to even try this when Mavericks (10.9.x) was introduced, and this continues through Yosemite (10.10.x).

Mail.app time machine backup not showing anything after upgrade.

Hi,
I have gone from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, and I have a concern that my Time Machine backup now does not show any of my emails since the upgrade.
Is this by design or has something more sinister occured?
Gavin.

Hi,
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My emails on this computer go back over a year, but I cannot seem to see them.
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Why does power nap time machine backup not work on my August 2012 macbook pro retina?

Hello. I got a MacBook Pro with retina display in August of this year 2012. I have done the SMC ? firmware update and I have 10.8.2 installed on my machine. Power nap still doesn't seem to work. I have the button in energy saver preferences and I have clicked it so it looks like power nap should work. When I am running Time Machine backup with the time capsule and I close the lid (plugged into power) it appears that no progress is made when I reopen the lid. I have closed the lid with activity monitor running and with network displayed. When I reopen the lid it may take up to one minutes to come out of sleep. When it does come out of sleep I can see that there has been no network traffic. Eventually, time machine backup resumes and I can see several megabytes per second. When I closed the lid overnight, just to make sure backup didn't restart after lid closing, I saw that no progress had been made in backup when I reopened the lid.
What options are left if I already have 10.8.2 and I have done the required firmware? One person has mentioned a clean install but I really don't like to have to reenter all the different passwords and all the different preferences again unless that's absolutely necessary. Are there any other options left to try before a clean install?
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Yeah I still have the same problem BTW; it still does not work.
The second I open the lid and take it out of sleep mode, it starts to backup automagically, but when it's sleeping EVEN when it's connected to AC power, TM backups do NOT work to my OS X Server.
I don't understand what the problem is here.
I didn't before but I do have FileVault turned on now -- should that make a difference?
In either situation it didn't work, but now that I think about it, I could understand why it wouldn't backup while asleep. Apparently the encrypted volume will stay encrypted during sleep and even at the lock screen; it's not until you open the lid and log in from the lock screen that it will unlock the encrypted boot volume.
But even still, I did *not* have FV turned on before, and this still did not work.
Is there some third party solution that can do what I want this to do?
Here's my use case:
1.) I have a mac mini at home that I use when I'm at home; it runs OS X server.app (bought and paid for) and has TM server turned on.
2.) I have a laptop that I mainly use at work and I don't use at all when I come home (ie. when I'm ready to head home for the day I close the lid and don't open it until I'm back at work the next day, but the laptop does come home with me every day).
What I want to have happen is this:
1.) The minute my laptop enters my home wifi lan (even though it's still asleep with lid closed) I want it to automatically backup the boot drive.
I thought that's what Power Nap was supposed to do, but then I found out that in order for this to work, you have to be connected to AC power; so then I tried that -- ie. every day I come home, I put my laptop in a docking station that has AC power, but TM backups while lid closed / sleeping STILL do not occur!
Thanks for your help everyone...Looking forward to a solution that works.
EDIT:
I found this thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4158709
"It looks like Power Nap doesn't perform Time Capsule backups when the MacBook Air screen is closed."
So apparently that is yet *another* requirement to get powernap working. The lid can not be closed.
What is the difference between sleep with lid open and sleep with lid closed!?

External hard drive time machine backups not mounting

I have used Seagate 500.11 external hard drive as a backup location for the time machine for over two years. I just got a message that it had not updated in over thirty days. It is not listed on FInder, but it is listed on the disc utility. The Time machine backups are grayed out on the disc utility screen and cannot be mounted, even after the repair and verification tests said that their volumes were ok. What should I do?

Time Machine does not create bootable clones. It does not even create a bootable backup. If that's what you prefer then do not use Time Machine.
If you use Time Machine then you must allocate at least twice as much space for the backups than the capacity of the drive you are backing up. A 2 TB backup drive would be suitable for a 1 TB main drive or smaller.
If you plan to create a bootable backup, then partition the backup drive with one partition the size required for the clone. Then use the other partition for you additional storage neeeds.

Encrypted Time Machine Drive not visible

Hi,
I have a Mac Mini (2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3 Ram) running OS 10.8.4 and all other OS/application updates have been run. I have a Drobo (2nd Generation, the one with four drive bays & Firewire) with 3.69TB used and 1.72TB free. The Drobo has the most up-to-date firmware 1.4.2 as well as the latest Drobo Dashboard software (2.5.2).
I was using a different NAS to backup my data from the Mini but the housing failed and I'm waiting for Other World Computing to send a new one. In the mean time, I decided to backup the Mini to the Drobo and Encrypt it. I believe it went through one complete backup of the Mini (440GBs) overnight. I also use the Drobo as my main drive for my photos and iTunes library. I have about 2TBs of music/movies and about 1TBs of photos already stored on the Drobo. During the day yesterday, during a regularly scheduled Time Machine backup (I believe it backs up every hour), I was in the process of deleting photos off the Drobo and got the dreaded spinning beach ball. I waited for 1/2 hour but still after no changes, I turned off the Mini and after rebooting the Time Machine drive will not show on the desktop.
The Drobo is visable in the Drobo Dashboard app and of course it says there are no issues.
The Drobo shows up in Disk Utility as a Virtual Whole Disk (in red type) and when running Verify or Repair Disk, it states that "Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk." I can do this till the cows come home but nothing changes. The only other info that shows up in red is "Invalid Disk Label @ 17591825289216: invalid field value. It repeats it four times, I'm assuming once for each drive. The last piece of info is "disk3s2 is not a CoreStorage volume.
I saw on another thread to run a Terminal command "diskutil cs list" and it came up with the below listed info.
Last login: Thu Jul 18 12:51:04 on console
skurkis:~ administrator$ diskutil cs list
CoreStorage logical volume groups (1 found)
|
+-- Logical Volume Group 6E1361BB-CAF7-468D-9CD5-5A77ED37C763
    =========================================================
    Name:         -none-
    Status:       Initializing
    Size:         0 B (0 B)
    Free Space:   -none-
    |
    +-< Physical Volume 161162B5-ABCE-4540-BA90-A3EA9E2E956B
        Index:    18446744073709551615
        Disk:     disk3s2
        Status:   Failed
        Size:     -none-
skurkis:~ administrator$
Any help to get my nearly 4TBs of music, movies, photos back would be awesome!
Thanks,
Jeff

Are there any utilities that can help "uncorrupt" the volume so I can rescue my data?
The only thing you can do is destroy the Core Storage logical volume, which will remove all data. If there is anything other than backup data on it, you're in a recovery situation, which is a job for professionals.
You should immediately start a new backup on another storage device. Don't do anything else with the computer until that's done.

Time Machine Backup Not Working - Please Help!

Hey everyone - first post here, please help! I'm having trouble with TM. Here are the messages from Time Machine Buddy:
Starting automatic backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Forcing deep traversal on source: "Macintosh HD" (mount: '/' fsUUID: AD5C219F-0EC8-32C3-B827-2FF171A4AE46 eventDBUUID: 68A67596-22DD-4FB5-AA49-390E857688E1)
Backup content size: 166.93 GB excluded items size: 34.36 GB for volume Macintosh HD
Found 842174 files (132.56 GB) needing backup
160.14 GB required (including padding), 824.43 GB available
Copied 74.41 GB of 132.56 GB, 693114 of 842174 items
Copied 130.6 GB of 132.56 GB, 728437 of 842174 items
Copied 731588 files (130.76 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Backup canceled.
Starting manual backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Forcing deep traversal on source: "Macintosh HD" (mount: '/' fsUUID: AD5C219F-0EC8-32C3-B827-2FF171A4AE46 eventDBUUID: 68A67596-22DD-4FB5-AA49-390E857688E1)
Didn't get valid migration dates.
Found 842174 files (1.87 GB) needing backup
3.9 GB required (including padding), 692.16 GB available
Copied 85694 files (1.71 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Using file event preflight for Macintosh HD
Will copy (41.8 MB) from Macintosh HD
Found 430 files (42.2 MB) needing backup
2.23 GB required (including padding), 689.79 GB available
Copied 5022 files (46 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Created new backup: 2012-10-09-015038
Copying OS X Recovery set
Starting post-backup thinning
Error: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-50 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -50.)" (paramErr: error in user parameter list) deleting backup: /Volumes/Time Machine Back
I tried to back it up the first time, and it was taking forever, so I stopped it, and then started a new backup. Can someone let me know what to do so I can be comfortable knowing the machine is definitely backed up?
Thanks!

The indication that the backup completed successfully is the best evidence that it did. If you want something more explicit, you can proceed as below.
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Drag or copy — do not type — the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:
sudo tmutil compare
You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up.
The command will take at least a few minutes to run. Eventually some lines of output will appear below what you entered.
Each line that begins with a plus sign (“+”) represents a file that has been added to the source volume since the last snapshot was taken. These files have not been backed up yet.
Each line that begins with an exclamation point (“!”) represents a file that has changed on the source volume. These files have been backed up, but not in their present state.
Each line that begins with a minus sign (“-“) represents a file that has been removed from the source volume.
Files that you’ve excluded from backup, or that are excluded automatically, are ignored.
At the end of the output, you’ll get some lines like the following:
Added:
Removed:
Changed:
These lines show the total amount of data added, removed, or changed on the source(s) since the last snapshot.

Time Machine Backup Not Accessible

Hello all,
Just had a computer die on me (HDD went bad) and took the oprotunity to upgrade, but my time machine backups are acting weird and I cannot get to my data. My setup is:
Dead computer: OS X 10.6.8
New computer: OS X 10.8.3 (maybe 10.8.5, reinstalled today and it took 4 freaking hours to d/l the OS. Sure miss those OS DVDs...)
TM backups: Going to the second HDD of OS X Server 10.7.5 over ethernet
Other cmoputer: OS X 10.8.4 (my laptop I used to try and view the TM backups)
First thing I did was use migration assistant on the new computer to move everything over from the old computers TM backup... and that did not go well. Files were missing, and the computer acted sluggish and displayed anomalies such as the menu bar at top vanishing until the desktop was clicked, and other weird little things. Thought: okay, must be the jump in OS versions. No problem, I'll do a fresh install.
So now I have decided to access the dead computers backup using TM from another computer. First problem: nobody has permissions to access the sparse bundle on the drive. Fixed that with the Admin account on the server, adding my u/n as having read/write access.
Now I can mount the sparse bundle, and I see all the folders are there, and some files. I do the "Browse other backup disks..." from my "other computer" on the network, and it gives me the option "Browse dead computer on ..." Click that and into space we go... and all I see are my files, on my local computer. Same thing happens when I use the server itself to try and view the sparse bundle.
I figure this is something weird with using the network and decide to try something else. I reformat another HDD connected to the server via FW800 as a case-sensitive drive, open up the sparse bundle, and copy the root folder onto the drive. Took a few hours, got one -50 error message (but it didn't stop the copy) and just tried to access it using "Browse dead computer on ..." and again, it shows me the local files. It doesn't display any of the TM backups from the dead computer.
What's going on here? Durring the OS install, I can pick the "restore system from TM" and it will find the TM server, I enter the u/n and p/w of the dead computer, and it prompts me to pick a TM backup I'd like to restore from. Likewise from migration assistant, it sees the TM backups just fine, and it "works" to an extent (in that it copies most of my files over. From what I recall, migration didn't prompt for a day to pick, it just copied probably the latest backup, which I bet wasn't complete due to the dead computer kicking the can for whatever reason. Moot point though). Is a OS version conflict preventing me from viewing a backup created with 10.6.8? Would a computer running SL be able to view the TM backup properly? (...I thought I tried this, can't recal now. But I can try at work again, I do have one last SL machine on the network).
Anyway, what other options do I have to view the data? At this point, I feel like I'm stuck rooting through the backups folder and hunting for files to copy over manually, which I know isn't prescribed practice.
Thanks for any input.

You can try a cloning program so that you'll have multiple backups which can help in a situation like this.
Clone - Carbon Copy Cloner (Often recommended as it has more features than some others)
Clone – Data Backup
Clone – Deja Vu
Clone - SuperDuper
Clone - Synk
Clone Software – 6 Applications Tested
Commonly Used Backup Methods

Time Machine backup not complete?

I've had Time Machine running now succesfully for a while.
HOWEVER ... a week ago my machine all of a sudden came to a grinding halt, with the internal HD becoming unresponsive.
After a lot of checking for solutions online, I've decided to erase the HD, and restore a former system thru TimeMachine.
The internal HD is still not functioning properly, but when I start up from an external HD, I can see it in Finder. When I check the contents, however, it does not seem to contain my applications!
I thought TM was supposed to make a full system backup?
Or maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?
Also, it now takes AGES for a folder to open on the restored drive. Is this normal?

TC-Productions wrote:
I've had Time Machine running now succesfully for a while.
HOWEVER ... a week ago my machine all of a sudden came to a grinding halt, with the internal HD becoming unresponsive.
After a lot of checking for solutions online, I've decided to erase the HD, and restore a former system thru TimeMachine.
Exactly how did you do the restore?
The internal HD is still not functioning properly, but when I start up from an external HD, I can see it in Finder. When I check the contents, however, it does not seem to contain my applications!
I thought TM was supposed to make a full system backup?
Or maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?
Since there's a problem on the internal, don't trust anything you see there. When you start up from the external, use Time Machine to see what's on the Time Machine backups, via the "Star Wars" display. Unless you excluded the Applications folder via TM Preferences > Options, it should be there.
Also, it now takes AGES for a folder to open on the restored drive. Is this normal?
If the drive is failing, don't count on anything being normal!

Time Machine backup not completed with error "The disk was not ejected probably..."

I have been using an UBS 3.0 capable external 2.5" hard drive from Lacie to backup my old 21.5" iMac for the last 2 years without problem.
Recently I bought the new late 2013 27" iMac running 10.8.5 and try to migrate the data from the Time Machine backup without success. After a while, Mountain Lion complained with the below error and only data before this message appear were migrated. When I connected the same disk back to my old iMac and ran disk utility, everything looks fine and I was able to complete the TM backup. Eventually, I managed to migrate the data using network copy, instead of TM backup.
Now that my new iMac is back online and I tried to setup Time Machine backup using the same 2.5" Lacie drive, the same error message appeared again in the middle of TM backup (after 3 minutes).
Wonder if anyone ran into the same issue and if there is an issue with the UBS 3.0 port on the new iMac, or there is a work around to this problem.
Any help or pointer would be highly appreciated.
Cheers,
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The system is losing connection with the drive for some reason, likely because the drive is losing power and unmounting, but there could be other reasons as well. Do you have access to an external power supply for the drive? If so then connect tthat so it is not relying on the USB bus power to keep the drive running. I have also found this to happen with some USB 3.0 enclosures, and it appears to be a compatibility issue with them and Apple's USB 3.0 drivers, so another option is to get a USB 2.0 hub and use that for the connection. Things will not run at USB 3.0 speeds, but the drives will not continually disconnect.

Time Machine backups not visible

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