Has Your Time Machine Disk Lost Its Icon? Here’s a Quick Fix.

When you designate a disk to be used for Time Machine’s backups, it’s given an icon that resembles an external disk in a green casing with a Time Machine logo on it. This makes it easy to instantly recognize the Time Machine disk and prevents you accidentally erasing it or using it to store other data.

Every once in a while, this disk seems to somehow lose its default icon. Instead of the green external disk it will have, for example, the same icon the main disk uses. This apparently happens when you add new disks to your system, at least that’s when it last happened to me.

Adding a new disk, by the way, will likely cause Time Machine to completely redo its backup instead of doing it incrementally, as it normally does. This is intended behaviour, any changes in hardware configuration will result in a fresh backup. You can still browse older backups, if you keep them, by clicking Time Machine’s menu bar icon and pressing the key. This will change the menu item Enter Time Machine to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.

So, how do you get back that familiar green icon? Since I couldn’t find the icon Time Machine uses for its backup disk anywhere, I managed to find another way to get it back:

1. Select the disk icon on the Desktop
2. Right-click (or -click) and select Get Info from the contextual menu
3. In the Info window, click once on the disk’s icon in the upper left corner, so it’s surrounded by a dim blue frame (see screenshot to the right).
4. Press X
5. The disk should now have its original icon restored. Close the Info window

If that didn’t work, you might have to employ some additional steps:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Select Time Machine
3. Click on Change Disk…
4. Re-select the disk you are using for Time Machine and click Use for Backup

Those steps should now have resulted in the default Time Machine disk icon being restored.

Tagged as: Leopard, time_machine

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