Time Machine only shows "Now", "Today " and "Yesterday"

Erroll wrote:

I can report further: I started this thread on Wednesday and the "Yesterday" backups I could access were from Tuesday morning. As the day progressed, the Tuesday morning backups no longer appeared; the earliest available backups were from Tuesday afternoon. It's now Thursday and I still see "Now", "Today " and "Yesterday"; Tuesday's backups are no longer available; "Yesterday" now shows Wednesday's backups ... except that I now have, before "Yesterday", a bar labelled "November 2020" and within it there is just one backup from Tuesday (i.e. the day before "Yesterday"). All the backups in "Today" and "Yesterday" load immediately, but if I select the one from Tuesday, the window just shows "Loading..." and it never completes. i.e. the backup never loads.

I just read About Time Machine local snapshots – Apple Support and now think that TM can only access my local snapshots. It's failing to see almost all the backups on my Time Capsule, and the one that it can see, it fails to load.

And comments or suggestions?

For maintenance hold the Shift key down and select the Time Machine icon in the menu bar of your Mac,

then select "BackUp with Consistency Scan".

Note: this will take longer to "prepare" the backup since it verifies the files as it runs to ensure that they're in good working order.

You can also hold down the Option key on your Mac while you click on the Time Machine icon at the top of the screen—Click on Verify Backups

Erroll wrote:

Yesterday was the first time I've tried to access Time Machine since installing Catalina a few weeks ago and I found that the timeline only goes back to yesterday. I found a link (can't find it now) to a thread on this site where someone had the same problem, and from that thread I followed a link to Pondini's procedure (should have booked marked it!) for rebuilding the TM database.

I did this and, after maybe 12 hours of "Preparing backup" TM did, in fact, perform a new backup. However, the timeline when I enter Time Machine still only shows "Now", "Today " and "Yesterday".

Any suggestions?

Hold the Option key and click the Time Machine icon in the upper right menu bar> Browse Other Backup Disk

If your new Mac inherits your backup history - Apple Support

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/if-your-new-mac-inherits-your-backup-history-mh35732/mac

How to use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

Erroll wrote:

I can add that I rebuilt the TM database late yesterday. However the backups available in TM go back to early yesterday morning. I believe all my backups are still on the backup disk, but TM won't look back further than yesterday.

If you need to create a new backup from Mac—

Catalina—

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/if-you-need-to-create-a-new-backup-mh34042/10.15/mac/10.15

Erroll wrote:

Thanks again for the reply, but I'm not sure what you're suggesting. I don't need to create a new backup; I have a backup; TM reports that my 2TB Time Capsule has 298 GB available. The rest of that is my backups.

The problem is that entering TM only gives me access to today and yesterday. As you can see from https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250779853, I'm not the only one who's encountered this. I wonder how many people just haven't noticed because they never actually enter TM.

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