Time Machine Menu Command Not Working – How to Fix

time-machine

I have Time Machine running on an external hard drive and it reports happily that it is doing backups and I have no reason to doubt it.

But when I try to look at the backups by clicking "Enter Time Machine" nothing at all happens. No noises from the disk as far as I can tell. Nothing. And when I locate the "Time Machine" app in the Applications folder and run that, again, nothing happens…

Do you have any idea what is up or what I need to do?

Best Answer

I just had the same issue in 10.11 El Capitan: "Enter Time Machine" did nothing, and nothing relevant showed in Console.app.

I relaunched Finder (Apple menu > Force Quit > scroll to Finder and choose Relaunch) and the issue was then resolved.

This surprised me, given that the relevant app is /Applications/Time Machine.app, not Finder. But it seems likely that Finder is actually responsible for the Time Machine display of the historic files: if I "Enter Time Machine", then check with ps or Activity Monitor via remote log in, I see no Time Machine process. So perhaps /Applications/Time Machine.app simply tells Finder to start the display, then exits.

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