Time Machine Backups Appear but are not Selectable

I agree with you about there being no solution here so would not mark this as solved. Hopefully people with similar problem will read about your experience and understand what might have happened and become aware of what might have caused it.

Good luck...

Try these Terminal commands and see what happens (you might also want to do a "man tmutil" and see all the options -- don't use quotes):

tmutil listbackups

That should produce a list of the various TM backups you have completed. Does this give you what you expected? Assuming that it does, try and look at some permissions and ownerships (change TMVOLNAME and COMPUTERNAME to match your setup):

ls -la /Volumes/TMVOLNAME/Backups.backupdb/COMPUTERNAME/

Are all the items listed owned by user "root" and group "wheel" (the third and fourth column of the output)?

Assuming they are look at these items in more detail with (might make sense to pick only one of the snapshots that fail for this test rather than all of them, e.g. /Volumes/TMVOLNAME/Backup.backupdb/COMPUTERNAME/DATE-TIME -- again change things to fit your TMVOLNAME and COMPUTERNAME and DATE-TIME and compare them with a snapshot that works):

ls -lae@ /Volumes/TMVOLNAME/Backups.backupdb/COMPUTERNAME/DATE-TIME

Basically try to find what is different about these various backup snapshots. I would suspect that there is something about ownership of the various snapshots that is preventing TM from correctly restoring files that you think are yours but it thinks they belong to someone else.

Be careful using tmutil and read and understand the man page description -- ask questions if something isn't clear. Wish there were an easy way to track down these sorts of problems, but none that I'm aware of. Looking for what is different in the two cases (some snapshots work and others don't) might turn up "why it happened", but the "how it happened" won't likely be knowable.

And don't try and manually copy files from the TM backups or try and change anything in the TM backups -- you will cause other problems. You can try and use "tmutil" command to restore a particular file or folder that is failing when you try and use the Time Machine GUI (graphical user interface - this is the normal way to interact with TM) but make sure you know what you're doing as it's easy to make mistakes -- perhaps check here first with what you think the command might be so we can comment on whether it looks like a reasonable thing to do.

Good luck...

ps -- did anything out of the oridinary happen with your system, like any username additions/changes or things like that?

Also, what does Finder say about the "/Volumes/Time Machine" -- do a get info or Command+i and is the "Ignore ownership on this volume" checked or not -- this checkbox is at the very bottom of the get info window?

Good luck...

Well, the date on the Backups.backupd shows Nov 13, 2016 -- so that was when it first got created.

What about my question about the presence/setting of the "ignore ownership" checkbox on get info (you need to expand the "sharing & permissions" arrow to see if this is present and if so if checked or not).

Also look at the extended attributes of Backups.backupdb with

ls -lae@ /Volumes/Time\ Machine/Backups.backupdb

And post back those results.

Good luck..

Yeah, this is the right info - and it appears that something has been changed. It appears something has been done to modify the permissions on the TimeMachine backup volume folders themselves (this is different than the volume permissions in the get info window above -- everyone should not have write permission on this volume -- any idea how/why that got changed. The reason for this is that Time Machine should have exclusive control of this volume, and normal users (ie everyone) need only read permission, since the Time Machine software, is the one who writes/creates/manages all the files on this volume (with the exception of Spotlight). You use TM to save and retrieve files, which is why read-only status is required. Any idea what happened to change this, or what else has been done to modify permissions on this volume? Also, this Time Machine disk appears to have been used with BackBlaze software at one time (the .bzvol folder has a date of Jun 18, 2019), is BackBlaze using this volume now? Don't know if this has anything to do with your problems, but that's something to look into. If BackBlaze is mucking around with Time Machine I would think that might be a problem.

Another odd thing I just noticed is the ownership of a couple of files with userid=502 (.fseventsd and .Spotlight-V100) and on my system they are owned by userid=501 -- this is probably due to the new account you talked about creating earlier. What is the userid owner of the /Users/david folder (do a "ls -lan /Users" to see this). Do you have both a 501 and a 502 user account or just the 502 or what?

But another discrepancy I've noticed -- the Get Info window image above has read & write for system, wheel, and everyone, (on my TM volume system & wheel have read&write but everyone has only read) but your comments talk about wheel having only read access -- so is the Get Info image from a mac that has the problem or does not have the problem? This is rather confusing so please straighten out this discrepancy.

Given this 501 vs 502 issue that I see, and your statement about creating a new user sometime, I'm gonna guess your problem is due to some of the TM files being owned by user 501 and some by 502, and that may be the cause of why TM won't restore some files that used to be owned by 501 user into your 502 owned /Users/david folder and some it will. I will bet the date of creation of /Users/* will show when you created these user folders (do a "ls -laUn /Users" to see the creation date of those folders and let us know the results).

If this is indeed the source of the problem, there might be a way to change ownership of things but not sure if this is possible with TM backups, or if this change might cause other problems. Does anyone else know if using "chown -R" type command on a TM backup tree is possible? I'm guessing that changing all files that were owned by 501 user to the 502 user would resolve the inability of TM to restore 501 files to the new 502 user now.

So, what I think you need to do is verify if this 501/502 issue is indeed your problem or not. You will need to look in your backup snapshots and see where this change took effect, so do something like this in each of the snapshots around the date of your new account creation change -- look at folder ownership of contents of the /Users folder (e.g. "ls -lan /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/MACHINENAME/DATE-TIME/SYSTEM-VOLUME-NAME/Users) and look for 501 and 502 items. Does this make sense? I'm guessing that you will see before a certain date you will only see 501 and after that date you will either see a 501 and 502 or just a 502.

Don't make any changes just do a some looking around and let us know what you find.

Good luck...

Well, the TM backups are not currently useable until you find the problem and fix it - at least for older stuff (newer stuff seems to be OK in TM, correct?). So, if there isn't anything critical in the TM backups, I would agree the easiest solution is delete all the TM backups and then start them over. But keep in mind that creating another new user in the future will result in the same sort of problem. Learn from mistakes is always a good lesson in life ;-) But be certain there is nothing critical in the TM backups you're about to delete, as there is no undoing this if you later realize there is something critical contained there.

Keep in mind, that there was no "error" as far as TM was concerned - it backs up whatever it's asked to do, without regard to who owns what. It's only a problem when restoring files later on that ownership and permissions can become an issue. So realizing the ramifications of creating a new user beforehand is what we've all realized with your problem -- thanks for helping us learn that lesson.

Good luck...

What does the following return (two commands - press return after both):

ls -la /Volumes/Time\ Machine
ls -lan /Volumes/Time\ Machine

Post back those results please...

Good luck...