Glam Prestige Journal

Bright entertainment trends with youth appeal.

Time Machine on Big Sug an APFS changed many things.

See for some information.

For the death of me, I cannot handle, compare and check those backups.

The backup device itself only shows the last backup, it seems:

mini:~ root# ls /Volumes/T5_1TB/
total 48
drwx------ 4 _unknown _unknown 128 Jul 31 17:15 .Spotlight-V100/
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root wheel 192 Sep 3 15:31
-rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel 20795 Sep 3 15:32 backup_manifest.plist

More of them are just mounted "local snapshots"

mini:~ root# mount | grep TimeMachine | wc -l 48
mini:~ root# mount | grep TimeMachine | tail -1
com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-08-17-213011.backup@/dev/disk7s1 on /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/2021-08-17-213011.backup (apfs, local, read-only, journaled, nobrowse)

tmutil can list the backups:

mini:~ root# tmutil listbackups | wc -l 40
mini:~ root# tmutil listbackups | tail -1
2021-09-03-153159.backup

That number does not correspond to the mounted volumes, which is strange.

The "tmutil compare -s" command works ...

But I cannot find a way to do the following things:

  1. See the size of the individual backups (solved, see below)

2) See the list of files that were backup'd, and their sizes in the backup

The /Volume/.timemachine/ snapshots each contain all files of the system, it seems. How to see which files were actually saved?

3) Delete selected backups

While the command itself seems to work, I see no reduction in space used:

mini:~ root# df -k /Volumes/T5_1TB/
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk7s1 976557744 177325284 799030000 19% 1483217 9764094223 0% /Volumes/T5_1TB
mini:~ root# tmutil delete -d /Volumes/T5_1TB -t 2021-09-03-143154
1 backups deleted
mini:~ root# df -k /Volumes/T5_1TB/
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk7s1 976557744 177278252 799077036 19% 1483217 9764094223 0% /Volumes/T5_1TB

No change at all.

I read websites since days, but Apple - as so often - does not document nothing, the man page just does not seem to be up-to-date and I cannot find any other website with current information.

This does also not work:

mini:~ root# tmutil calculatedrift /Volumes/T5_1TB/
Drift Averages
-------------------------------------
Added: 0B
Removed: 0B
Changed: 0B

While trying around, I found a working way to see the size of an individual backup - IF and WHEN it is mounted to /Volumes/.timemachine:

mini:~ root# tmutil uniquesize /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/
1012.0K /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/
mini:~ root# tmutil uniquesize /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/
63.4M /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/

But that still does not show, which files are contained ... And how to do that, when the snapshot volumes are NOT mounted? I cannot see any of them on the disk itself - as shown above, the is only one mountpoint visible ...

Everything is very cryptic.

Also, the latest backup is not normally mounted, it seems - so I cannot check it's size:

mini:~ root# tmutil listbackups | tail -1
2021-09-03-163148.backup
mini:~ root# tmutil latestbackup
2021-09-03-163148.backup
mini:~ root# ls -ald /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/2021-09-03-163148.backup
ls: /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/2021-09-03-163148.backup: No such file or directory

Any idea?

BTW, I can create a new "localsnapshot", but it is completely unclean to me, what this means - it does not seem to change anything at all:

mini:~ root# tmutil localsnapshot
NOTE: local snapshots are considered purgeable and may be removed at any time by deleted(8).
Created local snapshot with date: 2021-09-03-164519
mini:~ root# tmutil latestbackup
2021-09-03-163148.backup
mini:~ root# mount | grep 2021-09-03-164519
mini:~ root#

What did that do?!?

This may be, because those localsnapshots are not part of APFS, but this is a guess from:

mini:~ root# tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Volumes/T5_1TB
/Volumes/T5_1TB is an APFS backup disk. Use 'tmutil listbackups' to list APFS backup snapshots.
1 Reset to default

Know someone who can answer? Share a link to this question via email, Twitter, or Facebook.

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Sign up using Google Sign up using Facebook Sign up using Email and Password

Post as a guest

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy