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I tried TimeTracker, tms and timedog but none of them works with OS X 10.6

Any suggestions?

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migrated from serverfault.com Jun 10 '11 at 13:00

3 Answers

up vote 12 down vote accepted

Lion has come out with the tmutil command and the man page shows that it will crawl a specific backup and report very detailed information on your specific backups. The verbs compare, uniquesize, and calculatedrift look most useful if you don't mind the terminal.

I still use BackupLoupe on Lion (as well as on older OS) and have high praise and thanks to the team that built it every time I need to use it. I should probably send them more money, too. It's that good.

enter image description here

It makes it very easy to see what files are taking the most space between backups and also is indispensable for knowing when a specific file has been changed by tracking each time it is saved as a new version going back in time. It works on a local database so you are not crawling the filesystem each and every query - just once each time to collect the deltas for each backup. enter image description here

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+1 For this great piece of software! – mspasov Jun 10 '11 at 21:29
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Thank you so much! – Roman Prykhodchenko Jun 10 '11 at 23:26
up vote 4 down vote

Since Time Machine uses hardlinks to store unmodified files (and directories), this would mean that changed files in the latest backup will have a link count of 1 since they are unique. Use this together with find to generate a listing: 

find /path/to/your/latest/backup -type f -links 1 -print
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This doesn't work. It just displays all files. – Roman Prikhodchenko Jun 10 '11 at 11:04
Actually - this does work for me. I tested several folders with more than 2000 photos, and each time it picked out the 20 or 200 ( or zero) files that were new that backup. I still like soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe but this seems to answer the question as to what's new in a backup with a clever and speedy find command. – bmike♦ Jun 10 '11 at 15:09
up vote 1 down vote

The problem with that find command seems to be that HFS allows hard links on directories as well as regular files. As a result, files that have not been backed up for a while will show up with one link but one of their parent directories may have many links.

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