tmutil-status
PHP code for Apple's Time Machine status parsing and nice commandline display.
Why
There is no user-friendly way to get the status of a Time Machine backup from the command line on macOS.
But there is a hidden tmutil status command that provides some details in a not pretty way.
This script parses that non-user-friendly output and displays it nicely, so a status can be retrieved for example through ssh.
How
Processing code is in php 7.1+. It runs a check every 10s when a backup is running and display the new status.
This script doesn't depend on any other script/vendor/...
Running it
php tmutil-status.php
Output
Produces output like this when a backup is running:
Backup running on: /Volumes/TM
# Mounting backup volume
# Preparing source volume
# Finding changes
2.10% (23805 items)
21.92% (240251 items)
25.86% (301346 items)
36.96% (425665 items)
55.50% (632314 items)
67.73% (780977 items)
75.21% (880359 items)
82.35% (976994 items)
84.58% (1020393 items)
88.12% (1076181 items)
92.17% (1141944 items)
94.32% (1190445 items)
95.94% (1227456 items)
# Copying files
0.45% (14 files | 3.66 MB | ∞)
4.67% (127 files | 10.08 MB | ∞)
9.64% (559 files | 81.65 MB | ∞)
10.44% (944 files | 129.18 MB | ∞)
10.67% (1102 files | 438.48 MB | ∞)
10.74% (1469 files | 1.32 GB | ∞)
10.78% (2462 files | 1.52 GB | ∞)
10.89% (3152 files | 1.66 GB | ∞)
16.93% (3329 files | 1.70 GB | 8min 38s)
[...]
89.93% (111829 files | 23.60 GB | 2min 17s)
90.63% (114775 files | 23.70 GB | 2min 8s)
92.44% (116976 files | 23.76 GB | 1min 42s)
92.44% (117175 files | 23.76 GB | 1min 43s)
# Thinning
Backup not running
Last backup: 2023-02-11-113715
or like this when no backup is running:
Backup not running
Last backup: 2023-02-11-113715
NB
It should be easy to convert this script to any other scripting language (node, ...), since we first convert the output from tmutil into json, then make the display of the data.
Thanks to
- this StackOverflow question & answers: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/162464/time-machine-progress-from-the-command-line