View What Time Machine Backs Up 9
Time Machine
Hey
Time Machine is great for the average consumer of Mac’s. You don’t need to think about backing up files it just does it for you. But sometimes you have to wonder, what exactly does Time Machine backup? Some times, when I haven’t do a lot file creating, it backups around 2Gb of files. Some clever person has created a small perl application that scans your Time Machine backup for changes and displays them in Terminal.
The firs step is to download the timedog app. Its a small executable. Unzip the executable.
Time Dog (2.7 KiB, 1,396 hits)
Next open up Terminal. We are going to move the executable so it can be activated from any folder and you don’t have to write the path every time. In Terminal type
cd ~/downloads
sudo cp timedog /usr/local/bin
This will change the directory to your downloads folder, you will have to change this if you have a different downloads folder. It will then copy it into you local binary folder. This is a system protected area as a result you have to use you admin password to copy across the file. You can delete the timedog file in your downloads file when you have finished all of the steps.
The next step is to change Terminal to you Time Machine folder. In Terminal again type:
cd /Volumes/Time\ Machine/Backups.backupdb/[Computer Name]
You have to cross check the path correctly in Finder. The backslah (\) escapes any spaces. For example if you computer name has a couple of spaces in it or you Time Machine disk isn’t called “Time Machine”, you should use backslashes to escape them properly.
The final step is to invoke timedog, simply type the following:
timedog -d 5 -l
The -d option is the depth of files. If you have millions of files to backup you may find the Terminal output gets long. This cuts it down to only 5 folders deep. The -l modifier is linked to symbolic links that Time Machine creates. I would keep this option to to display the best output.
A simple little script. It looks clean from what I have seen although caution should be taken. It is interesting what Time Machine exactly backs up.
Via: Mac OS X Hints
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9 Responses to “View What Time Machine Backs Up”
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1
That’s not strictly true, you do have to think about backing up using Time Machine if you’ve spent hundreds more on tethering your backup plan to the wall, that is if you chose the “Time Capsule” option.
Personally I prefer a USB powered hard drive and daily online backup of my important files, which Time Machine, and if it did it would like only be to iDisk. Maybe in the future it will replace the Backup software that comes with MobileMe.
Comment By Ian on July 18th, at 3:04 am
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2
There are hundreds of backup options. Although its not a serious backup option, it is good enough for most peoples needs.
Comment By admin on July 18th, at 10:42 am
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I’m confused by this feed and comments – would love more advice – how much does time machine back up? I’m now thinking all of my data may not be backed up? thanks
Comment By Samantha Bell on December 27th, at 9:13 pm
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From my understanding of poking around the system files, Time Machine backup your home folder and files, applications and your Library files which keep applications running. It doesn’t for example back up system files which are used to make your computer run. This is done, instead, from your System disk when you recover your files when installing. I think it does this to save space and time.
Comment By admin on December 27th, at 9:37 pm
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5
Timedog has a new home on Google Code.
Check there for the latest updates.
Comment By JDS on January 24th, at 12:53 am
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6
I went through the instructions below, but now my Downloads folder is acting all weird when I try to put it back in the doc. How do I change the Download folder properties back to the way they were? Thanks!
Comment By Nic on March 3rd, at 9:29 pm
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@Nic, can you explain what you mean by weird.
Comment By admin on March 9th, at 3:20 pm
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I think that admin is wrong. Time Machine more or less creates a clone of the drive in the backup. So for example, I was able to restore from a backup made when I was running Leopard while booting from a CD running Snow Leopard, and when it was done my computer booted into Leopard just as it had been when I made the backup. That is to say, it did not pull the system files from the CD, but rather from the backup itself, or else it would have booted into Snow Leopard rather than Leopard.
(In case you were wondering, I did this because I learned the hard way that Snow Leopard currently breaks a lot of applications; my bad for installing bleeding edge software. :-) At least it’s cheap enough that I don’t feel cheated having it sit unused for a few months while my software gets updated to work with it.)
Comment By Greg on September 7th, at 3:53 am
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Had to have my hard drive replaced. Time Machine worked flawlessly to restore all data, applications and system software — however — I had a VMware Fusion application to run a Windows XP Home Edition system and it was not backed up by Time Machine. Even though the store repair people said the the Time Machine created a “mirror image”, it does not.
Comment By Michael on March 15th, at 12:51 am