Time Machine on Big Sug an APFS changed many things.
For the death of me, I cannot handle, compare and check those backups.
The backup device itself only shows the last backup, it seems:
mini:~ root# ls /Volumes/T5_1TB/ total 48 drwx------ 4 _unknown _unknown 128 Jul 31 17:15 .Spotlight-V100/ drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root wheel 192 Sep 3 15:31 -rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel 20795 Sep 3 15:32 backup_manifest.plist More of them are just mounted "local snapshots"
mini:~ root# mount | grep TimeMachine | wc -l 48 mini:~ root# mount | grep TimeMachine | tail -1 com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-08-17-213011.backup@/dev/disk7s1 on /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/2021-08-17-213011.backup (apfs, local, read-only, journaled, nobrowse) tmutil can list the backups:
mini:~ root# tmutil listbackups | wc -l 40 mini:~ root# tmutil listbackups | tail -1 2021-09-03-153159.backup That number does not correspond to the mounted volumes, which is strange.
The "tmutil compare -s" command works ...
But I cannot find a way to do the following things:
- See the size of the individual backups (solved, see below)
2) See the list of files that were backup'd, and their sizes in the backup
The /Volume/.timemachine/ snapshots each contain all files of the system, it seems. How to see which files were actually saved?
3) Delete selected backups
While the command itself seems to work, I see no reduction in space used:
mini:~ root# df -k /Volumes/T5_1TB/ Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/disk7s1 976557744 177325284 799030000 19% 1483217 9764094223 0% /Volumes/T5_1TB mini:~ root# tmutil delete -d /Volumes/T5_1TB -t 2021-09-03-143154 1 backups deleted mini:~ root# df -k /Volumes/T5_1TB/ Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/disk7s1 976557744 177278252 799077036 19% 1483217 9764094223 0% /Volumes/T5_1TB No change at all.
I read websites since days, but Apple - as so often - does not document nothing, the man page just does not seem to be up-to-date and I cannot find any other website with current information.
This does also not work:
mini:~ root# tmutil calculatedrift /Volumes/T5_1TB/ Drift Averages ------------------------------------- Added: 0B Removed: 0B Changed: 0B While trying around, I found a working way to see the size of an individual backup - IF and WHEN it is mounted to /Volumes/.timemachine:
mini:~ root# tmutil uniquesize /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/ 1012.0K /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/ mini:~ root# tmutil uniquesize /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/ 63.4M /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/ But that still does not show, which files are contained ... And how to do that, when the snapshot volumes are NOT mounted? I cannot see any of them on the disk itself - as shown above, the is only one mountpoint visible ...
Everything is very cryptic.
Also, the latest backup is not normally mounted, it seems - so I cannot check it's size:
mini:~ root# tmutil listbackups | tail -1 2021-09-03-163148.backup mini:~ root# tmutil latestbackup 2021-09-03-163148.backup mini:~ root# ls -ald /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/2021-09-03-163148.backup ls: /Volumes/.timemachine/B65704A0-0BA8-4818-AB7B-2A9F9B1977C3/2021-09-03-163148.backup: No such file or directory Any idea?
BTW, I can create a new "localsnapshot", but it is completely unclean to me, what this means - it does not seem to change anything at all:
mini:~ root# tmutil localsnapshot NOTE: local snapshots are considered purgeable and may be removed at any time by deleted(8). Created local snapshot with date: 2021-09-03-164519 mini:~ root# tmutil latestbackup 2021-09-03-163148.backup mini:~ root# mount | grep 2021-09-03-164519 mini:~ root# What did that do?!?
This may be, because those localsnapshots are not part of APFS, but this is a guess from:
mini:~ root# tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Volumes/T5_1TB /Volumes/T5_1TB is an APFS backup disk. Use 'tmutil listbackups' to list APFS backup snapshots. 
