For a while I was feeling pretty good about making the switch from whenever-I-get-around-to-doing-it backups with SuperDuper to hourly-in-the-background backups with Time Machine. But today I noticed that, even after more than a week, no history shows up when I attempt to “time travel”.
Then I find TS1760: “In the Mac OS X 10.5 Time Machine ‘time travel’ window, past backups may not appear if your computer name includes certain characters.”
The solution is to update to 10.5.5 or later. I’m pretty sure I had done that long before I set up Time Machine.
What the hell?
My computer name was “BR’s MacBook”. I renamed it to “BR MacBook” and, later, “BRMacBook”. So far I have learned:
- Time Machine does not freak out and renames the root backup folder appropriately.
- I am still unable to “time travel”.
- Many people on the Internet have reported the existence of this problem but nobody has claimed to have found a solution to it.
UPDATE: Apparently the way to time travel in this configuration is to option-click the Time Machine menu item (or ctrl-click the Dock icon) and select “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”. I found this out by browsing Apple’s discussion forums directly instead of simply assuming that Google knew it all.