34

The Time Machine control panel gives information on in-progress backups. For example

enter image description here

Is there a way to get the information from the command line?

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54

While the backup is running, detailed information gan be gained by 

tmutil status

which should return something like this:

Backup session status:
{
    BackupPhase = Copying;
    ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
    DateOfStateChange = "2014-12-18 14:14:21 +0000";
    DestinationID = "B4AF88-5AD5-49BE-B254-650B44E20499";
    DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/TimeMachine";
    Percent = "0.852581430477103";
    Progress =     {
        TimeRemaining = 0;
        "_raw_totalBytes" = 38596759;
        bytes = 36563200;
        files = 480;
        totalBytes = 42456434;
        totalFiles = 480;
    };
    Running = 1;
    Stopping = 0;
    "_raw_Percent" = "0.9473127005301144";
}

If you only care for the percentage, try the following (looks ugly, works only if there is a percentage to display):

tmutil status | awk '/_raw_Percent/ {print $3}' | grep -o '[0-9].[0-9]\+\(e-[0-9]\+\)\?' | awk '{print $1*100}'
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7
  • 2
    I couldn't find this in the manpage. Where did you glean this verb for tmutil? – jsejcksn Dec 8 '16 at 2:38
  • 4
    @jsejcksn To be honest, I don't remember where I found out about status, running tmutil help status now returns *** status is a private verb. ***; why this is the case and especially if this was the case two years ago, I don't know :D – Asmus Dec 9 '16 at 9:42
  • 3
    What is the format of the data from tmutil? It's not quite JSON. Is it some kind of C object dump? – Mr. Lance E Sloan Jan 27 '18 at 16:44
  • 5
    @LS this is formatted as a NeXTSTEP-style property list – Asmus Feb 5 '18 at 9:07
  • JSON files are somewhat brittle. Using a tool like jq which understands JSON to extract information might be a better approach. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Oct 28 '20 at 11:59
5

To get only the percentage value:

tmutil status | LC_NUMERIC="C" awk -F'"' '/_raw_Percent/ {print $4 * 100}'
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1

I managed to make a simple script from the accepted answer.

tmstatus () {
  eval $(tmutil status | grep -E '[^}];$' | perl -p -e 's/^\s+[\"]*//g;' -e 's/[\"]*\s+\=\s+/=/g') || (echo "Something get wrong..." && return 1)

  if [[ $Running -eq 1 ]]
  then
    export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
    [[ $BackupPhase == "Copying" ]] && Percent=$(printf '%0.2f%%' `bc <<< $Percent*100`) && echo "${DateOfStateChange} ${BackupPhase} backup to ${DestinationMountPoint}: ${totalFiles} files - ${Percent} (~$((${TimeRemaining:-0}/60)) min." || echo "${DateOfStateChange} ${BackupPhase} (Destination ${DestinationID})."
  else
    echo "TimeMachine backup is not running."
  fi
}
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