My main issue: When I try to do a Restore from Backup, the iMac does not seem to see backups more recently than from 7-8 months ago from the connected USB Time Machine drive. The drive had been constantly connected and seemed to always spin up and do regular backups all that time. Is there any way to find/recover the most recent backup if there is one?
How I got here: This is my elderly mother’s iMac (latest 4K running the latest macOS). She says she clicked on a link in an email and when Safari opened, the latter became unresponsive. She remembered something about “force quit” and for her in that moment that meant (sigh) holding down the power button till the screen went blank. When she tried to start it up again, all she got was the Apple logo with no progress bar.
I went over there and went through the recommended check list of things to try here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8336836 There seems to be no hardware issue and the Macintosh HD drive reports no errors under First Aid. But it won’t go past the Apple logo, even in Safe Mode. Now I’m trying to recover from Time Machine backup in recovery mode, until I ran into the apparent no-recent-backups issue. Right now I’m running First Aid on the Time Machine backup drive and that is taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r, but so far the only thing it has flagged is “incorrect permission for private directory.” Any tips to try on any of this?
How I got here: This is my elderly mother’s iMac (latest 4K running the latest macOS). She says she clicked on a link in an email and when Safari opened, the latter became unresponsive. She remembered something about “force quit” and for her in that moment that meant (sigh) holding down the power button till the screen went blank. When she tried to start it up again, all she got was the Apple logo with no progress bar.
I went over there and went through the recommended check list of things to try here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8336836 There seems to be no hardware issue and the Macintosh HD drive reports no errors under First Aid. But it won’t go past the Apple logo, even in Safe Mode. Now I’m trying to recover from Time Machine backup in recovery mode, until I ran into the apparent no-recent-backups issue. Right now I’m running First Aid on the Time Machine backup drive and that is taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r, but so far the only thing it has flagged is “incorrect permission for private directory.” Any tips to try on any of this?