My MacBook usually backs up regularly using Time Machine to a Volume shared from my Mac Mini (sharing a volume from another Mac is one of the few supported remote destination for backup options with Time Machine).

The volume was still shared from the Mac Mini but for some reason the MacBook didn’t see it when I connected via the Finder – other volumes and my home folder showed up fine though. Restarting the machines didn’t fix anything, so I resorted to Disk Utility to see if anything showed up there.

The only odd thing was that my Time Machine ‘server’ volume reported that “Owners Enabled” was “No” (at the bottom of the Disk Utility window). Disk utility doesn’t have a way to change/set this, but there is a command line utility you can run from Terminal that does :

vsdbutil -c /Volumes/TMServer
No entry found for '/Volumes/TMServer'.

If you run vsdbutil with the -a switch it will activate ownership on the specified volume :

bash-3.2# vsdbutil -a /Volumes/TMServer
bash-3.2# vsdbutil -c /Volumes/TMServer
Permissions on '/Volumes/TMServer' are enabled.

Once I re-enabled the Volume as a Shared Folder a Time Machine backup from the MacBook started almost immediately ! Success – Backups Restored !