Where are my backups?

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I've been an intermittent user of Time Machine for a year or so - intermittent in that I usually run the backups manually and can forget to do it for weeks at a time. But that's my lookout; no lectures required.

Since around the time I moved to 10.6 (although I can't be absolutely certain of that) whenever I enter TM, nothing shows except the current state. Behind that are a long line of black shapes extending into the heart of the galaxy...

Opening the sparse bundle image on my backup drive I can see a healthy collection of backups going back several months plus the dozen or so from today since I decided to leave TM running to test it. The image has the number of my ethernet MAC.

Can anyone suggest why I can't use Time Machine to access these backups?

Any advice much appreciated.
 
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17 inch 2 GHz C2D imac (5,1) with 3GB DDR2 RAM, X1600 (128MB memory) GPU - OSX 10.6.3
Well one reason could be because:

Say in your current is a directory, but in the past backups such a directory did not exist, then you can not go back in time to it cause it did not exist. When you go back in time it goes back to the same directory in time if it existed back then. If not you can't go back.

What you do if go to the root level of your directory your just opened main hard drive or something and then go back in time to your desired point. As that main HD directory always existed. And at your desired point back in time look around that backup for what you want.

I don't know if that helps you directly but it could be what is going on there.
 
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Thanks, the8thark, but that isn't the issue. I actually have no backups to look at. If you "Enter Time Machine" you'll see nothing behind the current page. Yet TM has been happily backing up on the hour for the past 22 hours. TM backup works; TM interface to browse backups doesn't. Any other thoughts. Cheers.
 
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have you cleared console to a fresh screen then opened and tried TM then looked in console to see if there is any TM errors gonig on?
 
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No errors. Actually, much as I like solving problems, I gave up and started afresh. As TM is not my serious archiving tool - more of a panic button - I was prepared to delete my backups and start again. And now it works. Here's the thing: my external drive shows a folder "backups.backupdb" whereas before it showed a disc image (a sparsebundle with MAC address) which is what I thought it should. But now it works. Can anyone explain this to me?
 

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