Two utilities let you explore Time Machine backups
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Review, Software, Utility Thursday May 8, 2008
Every so often we like to call your attention to some cool Mac-related articles, even if we didn’t write them. In this case, the articles cover a couple of ways to explore your Time Machine backups, and both of them are from the folks over at TidBITS. The first, “Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively”, tells you how to use a modified version of GrandPerspective to see which files are hogging space in your Time Machine backups. If any of these are files that don’t need to be backed up, you can exclude them from your Time Machine backups to make additional room for the files you do want to preserve.
The second explores a new command-line utility called tms, which is coincidentally enough written by Robert Pointon, who is also the author of the fseventer program that we reviewed previously. That article is called “Time Machine Exposed!” and it explains how you can use tms to get much more information about your Time Machine backups than has hitherto been available.
Now, we are not usually a big fan of command-line hacks here in the CrabApple Forest - if we’d wanted to use the command line we’d have stuck with MS-DOS! Mac users (moreso than, say, Linux users) seem to appreciate the value of a good Graphical User interface (GUI). So we are sort of hoping that either Mr. Pointon or someone else will write a GUI “front end” for tms sooner or later. But in the meantime, those of you who are into doing things from the command line, along with those who simply want to be able to delve into your Time Machine backups and find out “what’s in there”, will surely appreciate the information contained in the above-mentioned two articles.
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