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macospermissionsbackuptimemachine

Can't connect to a current Time Machine backup disk

Here is a working solution if you get a pop up warning like Can't connect to a current Time Machine backup disk. when browsing Time Machine and Verify/Repair Disk turns out OK in Disk Utility.

See my answer below.

Solution

  • Go to your Time Machine drive in Finder and check the permissions of Backups.backupdb. If you see a red stop sign it means that the permissions are wrong.

    Open Terminal and check out the permissions

    $ sudo -s
$ cd /Volumes/Time\ Machine
$ ls -l
drwxrwx---@  6 root      wheel      204B Jul  9 16:26 Backups.backupdb

    Not sure why the group is set to wheel (perhaps previous macOS versions had administrators in the wheel group as well?), but changing it to admin, assuming your user has Administrator privileges fixes the issue

    $ chgrp admin Backups.backupdb

    This seems to have fixed it for me. No need to change the rwx permissions. I am unsure if there is a Repair Permissions feature for Time Machine drives, as this has been removed from Disk Utility.