New mac can't find time machine backup to restore

[TeamSAM]

My wife had her laptop stolen last week, and we got a replacement this weekend. When we plugged in our external time machine drive during setup, it only provides the option to restore from an ancient backup of a computer we had a couple years ago. Neither my computer nor her (stolen) one appear in the list.

When I look at the drive in finder on my computer, I can see the backup I want to use in backups.backupdb, but there's also an old .sparsebundle backup on the drive, which is the only one that shows up.

How do I get the new mac to see the .backupdb backups so I can restore from one?

Thanks,
SAM

 

[Bruno09]

Hi,

see if this can help : http://pondini.org/TM/17.html

 

[TeamSAM]

ok, I skipped the restore and selected the correct backup per the instructions, but when I "enter Time Machine" I can't actually browse the old backups to restore files- the dates of backups show up, but they're grayed out and can't be selected.

I can manually browse to files and copy them via the finder, but I'd prefer just to restore everything. What am I missing?

 

[Bruno09]

Try this : https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1799402/