2

I'm sure the information is irrelevant to the question, but I'm running macOS 10.14.6.

Just today I discovered the very interesting tmutil status Terminal command. For instance, while the menu bar icon merely displays "Preparing backup", this command provides actual progress information, similar to this:

Backup session status:
{
    BackupPhase = ThinningPreBackup;
    ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
    DateOfStateChange = "2019-10-06 15:54:55 +0000";
    DestinationID = "XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX";
    DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/XXX";
    NumberOfChangedItems = 2020012;
    Percent = 0;
    Running = 1;
    Stopping = 0;
}

It bears mentioning that this information is continually updated (as fast as I can rerun the command in Terminal), letting me know the backup is progressing, whereas the menu bar icon shows no progress at all during this phase.

And after the actual backup starts, this is printed:

Backup session status:
{
    BackupPhase = Copying;
    ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
    DateOfStateChange = "2019-10-06 16:14:36 +0000";
    DestinationID = "XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX";
    DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/XXX";
    Percent = "2.26301435425844e-05";
    Progress =     {
        "_raw_totalBytes" = 68715697586;
        bytes = 1727829;
        files = 30385;
        totalBytes = 75587267344;
        totalFiles = 2093070;
    };
    Running = 1;
    Stopping = 0;
    "_raw_Percent" = "2.514460393620488e-05";
}

Clearly this is much more information than the menu bar icon or System Preferences pane provides. On the other hand, it's not too user-friendly: one has to run the command periodically in Terminal, and parse the text output.

Is there a GUI app that presents this information in an easier to read way, which is automatically updated?

swineone
  • 2,341
  • Interesting information. Using a little shell scripting, you could pull this info from tmutil and process it into a form more pleasing to the eye. If you are comfortable using the sed stream editor command in Terminal, this could probably be done in one line of carefully crafted code. I know of no current GUI (or otherwise) app which provides this info. Perhaps this is a good starting point for exploration? – IconDaemon Oct 06 '19 at 17:19

2 Answers2

4

I have made a shell script to output of 'BackupPhase' from tmutil status to the menu bar, and then I have the rest of the information available if you click on the menu bar item.

To display the output of this script in the menu bar, you will need the excellent TextBar app, which costs $5 (IIRC) and is well worth it.

Here's what it looks like right now (the "ThinningPostBackup" part is what is shown in the menu bar. The rest only appears when the menu bar item is clicked.)

You'll notice the top 3 sections are formatted, and then I just include all of the tmutil status information below (everything from "Backup session status" and below), because sometimes it might have interesting stuff in it, and I'm nerdy like that.

enter image description here

I have put my TextBar / Time Machine script up on GitHub for anyone who would like to use or adapt it.

TJ Luoma
  • 20,659
1

to just see numbers running i use this:

while sleep 1; do tmutil status; done

this creates an infinite loop. it displays the current status every second. you see the changes easy.

to abort this script you can use the commond short cut for aborting a running command in the console:

  • shortcut: control+c
muescha
  • 152