Time Machine cacked

[Speed38]

I have a pal who came to me for help and I am stumped.

He just ran the latest incremental update to Ventura on a fairly new iMac (not Silicon) and he lost all the many mailboxes he had set up in the Mail.app On My Mac.

When he went to [Browse Time Machine Backups,] he could not go back any farther than one day, even though he had backups over a year old.

Is there any app/terminal command/whatever to use to repair his Time Machine so that he can access the backups made before this latest incremental update within Ventura?

Many thanks.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

I’m having an intermittent issue here also with Time Machine having trouble reading backups. What he’s seeing is the local snapshot of a backup that may or may not have been copied to the Time Capsule yet. Rebooting or even running a cache cleanup using Onyx might get Time Machine reading the backup again. Or just give it time. Like I said, it’s quite intermittent here and I’m not sure what the dealio is.

 

[Speed38]

Thanks for that feedback. I hate to be a bother, but may I trouble you to point me towards which settings in the Onyx toolbar he should use to address his TM problem? Should I tell him to go to [Maintenance] in the Onyx toolbar and run the default setup? I see there is a [Mailboxes inMail] Rebuild the Index that is turned Off by default - should he turn that on?
Again, thanks for the help!

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Thanks for that feedback. I hate to be a bother, but may I trouble you to point me towards which settings in the Onyx toolbar he should use to address his TM problem? Should I tell him to go to [Maintenance] in the Onyx toolbar and run the default setup?

Yes.

I see there is a [Mailboxes inMail] Rebuild the Index that is turned Off by default - should he turn that on?
Again, thanks for the help!

Nah, no need for this task.

 

[Speed38]

OK, thank you once again!

 

[Speed38]

Just to report back, he ran Onyx, restarted, went back to Time Machine but he cannot go any farther back in his TM backups than 23 Feb.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Just to report back, he ran Onyx, restarted, went back to Time Machine but he cannot go any farther back in his TM backups than 23 Feb.

I can only suggest he retry periodically. It’s just really random. If he wants to verify that the backups exist, a 3rd party tool can check. The only one I know of is Tinkertool System. It has a module to manually manage Time Machine backups and can verify what exists on the backup drive.

 

[Speed38]

Hmmm. Off to check out Tinker Tool. Thanks again

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Hmmm. Off to check out Tinker Tool. Thanks again

Make sure you get TinkerTool System, not the plain old TinkerTool. TTS is a robust set of system maintenance tools. It's quite excellent. TinkerTool is great but does simple tweaking of various hidden settings.

Marcel Bresink Software-Systeme: Products

Product Page

www.bresink.com

 

[Speed38]

Reporting back to close the loop on this one:

What he finally did was to purchase BackupLoupe, got into his 15 Feb TM backup, found the V10 folder, replaced his current "corrupted" V10 folder with it, got back the many mailboxes he had created On My Mac, but all of them were empty. The hundreds of emails that once populated those mailboxes were gone.