with apologies

Back to the Future

Richard Mortier · December 14, 2017 · #tech #macos #old

Ed: the first in a likely series, this is one of the posts I drafted but never published during my seven years in the blogging wilderness

I have been having persistent issues on MacOS with Time Machine backups interacting badly with several configuration elements and other services. This is exacerbated by my use of maildirs to backup emails, with my Gmail account leading to a directory with some millions of files. (Yeah, ok, maybe not wise but hey, we are where we are.)

So in the course of trying to get backups to work reliably, I found the following commands useful to at least some degree:

for n in  ComputerName LocalHostName HostName ; do 
  scutil --get $n
done
log stream --style syslog --debug --info \
  --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"'
log show --style syslog --debug --info --start YYYY-MM-DD \
  --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"'\