Hey community! Long-time lurker, first-time poster.
Had to ask this question because I've read somewhere around 3 dozen posts with similar problems but none are nailing what I'm dealing with. I started a new Time Machine set up with an external hard drive in October. Time Machine has worked just fine for me in the past, and I have only three backups: one in October, one in November, and one in December. I'm trying to restore a lost file that might be in the November backup or the October backup, but here lies the problem. I can enter Time Machine, I can see the December backup and restore those files just fine. However, when I scroll back to November or October, the Finder header says "Waiting" and never loads up my files. I've waited as long as an hour and a half after reading a couple threads where someone was having such an issue (but ultimately their problem was unrelated and the thread was 4 years old, so no solution for me).
I already spoke with Apple Support. They didn't really help much, just had me reboot my MBP in safe mode and see if the backups appeared then, then they recommended I go to an Apple-approved service provider two counties away. There has to be a more grounded, simpler solution to this problem. Also, yes, I do view all of my mounted volumes using shift-cmmd-c while in Time Machine before trying to navigate to the desired backup—it's when I scroll to that backup that I get this result in the following image:
![Screen Shot 2022-01-14 at 11.48.04 AM.png]( "Screen Shot 2022-01-14 at 11.48.04 AM.png")
![Screen Shot 2022-01-15 at 3.29.33 PM.png]( "Screen Shot 2022-01-15 at 3.29.33 PM.png")
Had to ask this question because I've read somewhere around 3 dozen posts with similar problems but none are nailing what I'm dealing with. I started a new Time Machine set up with an external hard drive in October. Time Machine has worked just fine for me in the past, and I have only three backups: one in October, one in November, and one in December. I'm trying to restore a lost file that might be in the November backup or the October backup, but here lies the problem. I can enter Time Machine, I can see the December backup and restore those files just fine. However, when I scroll back to November or October, the Finder header says "Waiting" and never loads up my files. I've waited as long as an hour and a half after reading a couple threads where someone was having such an issue (but ultimately their problem was unrelated and the thread was 4 years old, so no solution for me).
I already spoke with Apple Support. They didn't really help much, just had me reboot my MBP in safe mode and see if the backups appeared then, then they recommended I go to an Apple-approved service provider two counties away. There has to be a more grounded, simpler solution to this problem. Also, yes, I do view all of my mounted volumes using shift-cmmd-c while in Time Machine before trying to navigate to the desired backup—it's when I scroll to that backup that I get this result in the following image:
