![]() You should not make any changes within the Backups.backupdb folder (backup store) using commands in Terminal (other than tmutil), though. You can also remove complete backups in the Time Machine app, or using tmutil at the command line (see below): in theory, they should be safer tools to use. So if you decide you want to save space by removing one or more complete backups, that should be safe to perform in the Finder. Within any backup set (machine directory), you can move, copy, or delete items down to the level of individual backups using the Finder. More selective surgery needs to be thought out carefully. If that backup set – that’s the complete set of individual backups for a named Mac – is the only item on that volume, it’s much quicker to re-format that volume using Disk Utility. You can, for example, put a complete backup set in the Trash and empty it, but you’ll then discover just how long it takes to remove what could well be several million items. The next thing to bear in mind is that even a relatively small backup consists of a huge number of files, folders, and hard links to them. That’s not true: although you can repair TM backups using regular tools (see below), the moment that you start messing with them, you’re putting all your backups at risk. the folders and files in the backup of that volume.Īs local backups are in HFS+ format, and can be opened and browsed in the Finder or at the command line, it’s tempting to think that you can do anything you like to them and they’ll just carry on working.DocumentRevisions-V100 containing a backup of the macOS versioning database Within a volume file in a backup, you’ll find: This is one good reason that backups made by 10.15 are incompatible with Mojave and earlier. In Catalina, the standard set of volumes now includes the System volume, named something like Macintosh HD, the Data volume Macintosh HD – Data, and the Recovery volume, to which you add any other volumes which are being backed up by TM. a folder containing the backup for each volume which was backed up.eventdb files, containing details of the items backed up. ist, a property list detailing all the folders and files excluded from that backup. Backup.log, a small log file for the backup. ’s, a backup set or machine directory, containing individual backups, which are folders named with a datestamp.spotlight_temp, with more Spotlight search files. These are needed when you boot from the backup volume. RecoverySets, a hierarchy of folders containing, which is in essence a Recovery volume, complete with Apple Diagnostics. In the Backups.backupdb folder (the backup store), you’ll find: There’s more to a Time Machine backup than just the files and folders of the backup. I’m going to leave networked backups to the next article in this series, so here will consider only TM backups on HFS+ format drives. What do you do, though, when you go to your Time Machine (TM) backup and it either throws an error, or doesn’t work properly?įor the time being, there are two types of TM backup: those on local storage such as an external drive in HFS+ format, and those on a networked device which uses SMB or the older AFP protocols and stores the backups in a special sparsebundle format, which is compatible with that class of storage. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve heard of businesses and sometimes even large organisations who have gone to their backups only to discover that nothing is there at all. As part of backing up, it’s essential that you routinely check that your backups work properly. This article considers what can go wrong with those backups.Įvery Mac user should make backups as part of a joined-up backup policy, which ensures that you can recover from disasters minor and major without losing significant data, and in acceptable time. The previous article in this series looked at how T2M2 can reveal useful information about problems occurring during Time Machine’s automatic backups.
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