10.5: View exactly which files Time Machine backed up

You may occasionally notice Time Machine is backing up an unexpectedly large amount of data, or maybe you're just curious as to what actually changed between backups. Perhaps you'd like to tailor your exclusion list to keep the backup size down. Unfortunately, the Time Machine interface provide no means to find out what it is actually being backed up. Luckily, we can use the fact that Time Machine creates hard links of unchanged files to explore what it did back up, after the fact. timedog is a Perl script (4KB download) which does just that. Use it like so: $ cd /Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/myhost $ timedog -d 5 -l By default, timedog will examine the most recent backup, compare it to the one prior, and report all changed files. The -d flag controls the direc...
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:30:04 +0200

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