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Time Machine failure or Drive failure

We were unable to access Time Machine on our 2015 MBP 16MB 1 TB OS12.4 and an external Seagate 2TB SRDONF1. I entered Time Machine and it seemed, normal however when I attempted togo aback in time I was unable to go back more than a couple of hours. I didn't note just how far. When I checked the drive using Disk Utility it reported that it had 440GB on it. When I plugged it into my M1MM I could see that had about 60 files on it that appear to be backup files with names like 2021-08-30-102227. Does this appear to be a drive failure or a software problem?

MacBook Pro

Posted on Jun 27, 2022 1:35 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 27, 2022 1:51 PM

Does this appear to be a drive failure or a software problem?


A drive failure on the Mac....and things would not run at all on the Mac.....so no drive failure there.

Drive failure on the Seagate......nothng would show up at all if this were the case....so no drive failure there.


Eject the Seagate drive and then power it down

Restart the Mac

Power up the Seagate drive and let things run for a few minutes


Open up Time Machine and give things about 10+ minutes to fully load. You can tell if the backups have been fully loaded by looking at the timeline scale at the far right of the window. If everything has loaded, each of the backup times and dates will display as bright red......not dull red.


Please report on your results. It might help if we knew what operating system is installed on the Mac.



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3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 27, 2022 1:51 PM in response to Bob1177

Does this appear to be a drive failure or a software problem?


A drive failure on the Mac....and things would not run at all on the Mac.....so no drive failure there.

Drive failure on the Seagate......nothng would show up at all if this were the case....so no drive failure there.


Eject the Seagate drive and then power it down

Restart the Mac

Power up the Seagate drive and let things run for a few minutes


Open up Time Machine and give things about 10+ minutes to fully load. You can tell if the backups have been fully loaded by looking at the timeline scale at the far right of the window. If everything has loaded, each of the backup times and dates will display as bright red......not dull red.


Please report on your results. It might help if we knew what operating system is installed on the Mac.



Time Machine failure or Drive failure

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