asked on

want to see what time machine backup is currently working on (list backup files)

I want to see a list of files that are currently backed up by time machine while the backup is running.

Is there no backup log file (plain text) that is written to? Only database structure or special application internal information?

I would like to see what is going on...

Thanks a lot for your help

(running actual MacOs, Time Capsule).

Owen Rubin

Here is a discussion of how to do that on stackexchange. Don’t reallly feel good about just copying it here:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/68515/time-machine-list-of-files-that-were-backed-up

serialband

Go to the command line - Open Terminal.app

Get the manual page to tmutil
man tmutil

tmutil listbackups

Time Machine writes backups to /var/log/system.log and you can view that in Console.app. Just search for backupd.

Rolands69

ASKER

this is not what I am looking for. Is only error messages about object classes.

I want to see how it dives through my files during backup. List each file that is backup, live. Should be possible on a linux system, or not?

Thanks for further ideas.

Owen Rubin

Did you look at the link I posted? In that Stackexchange it talks about seeing what files are being backed up
Like this answer:

If you're interested in seeing what files are being read as the backup happens, you can use this command:

sudo opensnoop -n backupd | grep -v 'Time Machine Backups'
Note: the above worked in earlier versions of macOS. In High Sierra, something approximating this is:

sudo fs_usage -f filesys backupd
However there's a lot of noise from the backup volume itself that I haven't figured out how to get rid of.

If you want to watch which files are being transfered in realtime you can monitor the time machine daemon with

sudo fs_usage -f -R filesys backupd

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