Time Machine progress from the command line

Question

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

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

Answer 1

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}'

Updated 10 years later:

To better parse tmutil's plist output using builtin methods, you need to remove the initial line with tail and then convert it to JSON via plutil:

tmutil status | tail -n +2 | plutil -convert json -o - -- - | jq

Note that the pipe into jq is given here only for nicer formatting. To directly access individual values, instead use e.g.: | jq '.["BackupPhase"]'

Answer 2

To get only the percentage value:

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

Answer 3

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
}

Answer 4

Maybe a bit more complicated but also more practical for processing, the following command will write the progress status into a plist file and convert it into json:

tmutil status | grep -v 'Backup session status' > a.plist; plutil -convert json a.plist

Json can be parsed more easily to extract various information.

Answer 5

I used @Atika's very helpful script but sometimes got errors like

bash: 26520.80484282512/60: syntax error: invalid arithmetic operator (error token is ".80484282512/60")

So I made a slight tweak to pass that division operation to bc and now it works reliably (caveat: for me!):

Before:

(~$((${TimeRemaining:-0}/60)) min."

After:

(~$(bc <<< ${TimeRemaining:-0}/60) min.)

Updated Script:

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 - ${Percent} (~$(bc <<< ${TimeRemaining:-0}/60) min.)" || echo "${DateOfStateChange} ${BackupPhase} (Destination ${DestinationID})."
else
  echo "TimeMachine backup is not running."
fi
}

Answer 6

I did a script for this that can be executed from Terminal.

https://github.com/fedekrum/Mac-Time-Machine-status

#!/bin/bash
Check if we're root and re-run if not.
if [ $(id -u) -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "Script not running as root, trying to elevate to root..."
    sudo bash "$0" "$@"
    exit $?
fi
clear
Get the PID of the process "/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd"
PID=$(ps -ef | awk '$8=="'/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd'" {print $2}')
If the process is not found, it alerts the user and quits
if [ -z "$PID" ]; then
    echo "The process '/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd' is not running"
    exit 1
fi
clear
Loop to continuously check the status
while true; do
    echo -e "\033[H"
# Check if the output of "tmutil status" contains "ThinningPreBackup"
if tmutil status | grep -q "ThinningPreBackup"; then
    # If it does, run "lsof -p $PID" and show the last line as the status
    echo
    printf "$(lsof -p $PID | tail -n 1 | awk -F'/[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{6}' '{print substr($2, 2)}')\n"
else
    # If it doesn't, show the result of "tmutil status"
    echo
    printf "$(tmutil status)\n"
fi

# Get the width of the terminal

width=$(tput cols)
Generate a line filled with spaces
line=$(printf '%*s' $width)
Do it for three lines
for i in {1..3}; do
    # Print a carriage return and the line of spaces, effectively overwriting the current line with spaces
    echo -en "\r$line\r"
# Move to the next line
echo

done
# Wait for 10 seconds before the next round
for i in {10..1}; do
  echo -e "\033[H"
  echo "$i "
  sleep 1
done

done