Can't connect to a current Time Machine backup disk

macos permissions backup timemachine
Marc Etcheverry picture Marc Etcheverry · Jul 12, 2017 · Viewed 10.5k times · Source

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.

Answer

Marc Etcheverry picture Marc Etcheverry · Jul 12, 2017

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.

Related questions

XAMPP permissions on Mac OS X?

I installed XAMPP 1.7.3 on Mac OS X 10.6.8 without changing any defaults. The webserver seems to work okay, but the permissions on the htdocs directory are set to "Read only" for everyone other than system. So (a) I have to provide …

Read More
Correct owner/group/permissions for Apache 2 site files/folders under Mac OS X?

It's hard to find Mac-specific answers to this question on the web, so I'm hoping someone out there can put this one to rest for me? My permissions are screwed up on my sites and I'm not sure how to …

Read More
warning: Insecure world writable dir /usr/local/bin in PATH, mode 040777

Every time I run this command rails server: warning: Insecure world writable dir /usr/local/bin in PATH, mode 040777 I searched for a solution here and they said to type: chmod go-w /usr/local/bin But I get this error: …

Read More