"No backupset selected to be restored" SQL Server 2012

My problem ended up being permissions. I'm on a dev machine and copied via Homegroup. Somehow, probably based on where I copied the file to, the permissions got messed up and Management Studio couldn't read the file. Since this is dev I just gave Everyone permissions to the bak file and could then successfully restore via the GUI.

I had this problem and it turned out I was trying to restore to the wrong version of SQL. If you want more information on what's going on, try restoring the database using the following SQL:

RESTORE DATABASE <YourDatabase> 
FROM DISK='<the path to your backup file>\<YourDatabase>.bak'

That should give you the error message that you need to debug this.

When running:

RESTORE DATABASE <YourDatabase> 
FROM DISK='<the path to your backup file>\<YourDatabase>.bak'

It gave me the following error:

The media family on device 'C:\NorthwindDB.bak' is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family. RESTORE HEADERONLY is terminating abnormally. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 3241) Blockquote

Turns out You cannot take a DB from a Higher SQL version to a lower one, even if the compatibility level is the same on both source and destination DB. To check the SQL version run:

Select @@Version

To see the difference, just create a DB on your source SQL server and try to do a restore from your backup file, when you do this whit SSMS, once you pick the backup file it will show some info about it as opossed to when you open it from a lower version server that will just say "no backupset selected to be restored"

So if You still need to move your data to a lower version SQL then check This.