Time Machine

One of new features, aimed at ensuring people improve their backup habits and enabling intuitive restore.

Freeing up local snapshots

If you find that the hourly snapshotting feature (which uses your internal storage) is taking up too much storage for your liking, you can toggle it off and on again to free up space:

sudo tmutil disablelocal
# Wait for it to be freed up automatically
sudo tmutil enablelocal

Or, in Big Sur, you can just

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /

Resources

Field Category Date Link Notes
Linux 2024-07 timeshift

Creates Linux filesystem snapshots using rsync+hardlinks, or BTRFS snapshots

2009-02 Time Vault

A Linux equivalent under development.

Reference 2011-09 Mass Deploying Time Machine in Mac OS X Lion

All you ever wanted to know about scripting and CLI usage, from changing destinations to setting exclusions.

2009-10 Create networkable, encrypted and copyable Time Machine backups

Very neat. I’ve saved a local copy of the scripts for creating and restoring from encrypted disk images.

2008-05 Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively

Using a modified version of GrandPerspective

Time Machine Exposed!

Using the tms command line tool to explore backups

2006-08 MacWorld First Looks article

Where it is mentioned that it was supposed to work in oh, slightly different ways

2006-03 Time Machine

a pretty good rundown, complete with under-the-hood details

Tools 2024-04 TimeMachineStatus

A simple macOS menu bar app that shows the status of Time Machine backups

2014-01 Time Warp

a tool for modifying Time Machine backup behavior using weighted reservoir sampling.

2012-08 Time Machine Editor

An alternative scheduler that does away with the irritating defaults.

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