Time Machine Backups Not Accessible

W

wickerman

Registered
My MacBook seems to be backing up normally to my Time Machine. When I click on the drive and inspect backups, I see entries going all the way back to 2015. However, when I run Time Machine the only backups I currently have access to are the last two I made (yesterday and today). Can someone please explain and advise?

El Capitan 10.11.6
 
Do you have TimeMachine showing in the Menu Bar? If so, go to it and select Enter Time Machine from there.
Once it opens loo to the far right. You should see a time line that should take you back several months.

If not, could you have gotten a warning that you Time Machine drive is running out of room, and you said to yourself ‘later’ ?
 
Cheryl said:
Do you have TimeMachine showing in the Menu Bar? If so, go to it and select Enter Time Machine from there.
Once it opens loo to the far right. You should see a time line that should take you back several months.

If not, could you have gotten a warning that you Time Machine drive is running out of room, and you said to yourself ‘later’ ?
Click to expand...
Yes, I see the timeline but all the dates have a red line against them and when I click them nothing shows. In the middle of the screen I only see two previous backup states in the stack. I don't recall any messages about low space, and About This Mac shows I have over 1Tb of free storage space left on the disk.
 
Open a window for the Time Machine drive and see if you can view the folders older than two days ago. You should be able to open each dated folder and view the contents.

Two days ago, did you apply an update to the system? Or did you experience a power failure? My other thought is that it could be that the older dates are corrupt.

Just for a piece of mind, you can do a start over. Turn off Time Machine, After a few minutes, turn it on and select the drive. Now click on back up now. It should go through a erase of the drive, preparing it for Time Machine back up, then begin the process.
 
Interestingly, I now seem to have access to all the backups. I think I must have been trying to locate backups of a folder or directory which didn't exist before.

Thanks anyway for the advice.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top