If you use Mac OS X, then you should take a look at Time Machine. It’s a very convenient and easy to use backup solution. The only drawback of Time Machine is that you often don’t know what it is doing. When you dig deeper, you can find out what is happening under the hood.
Console
Mac OS X ships with the Console application (Applications – Utilities – Console) enabling you to view all kind of logfiles. The system.log file contains the information from Time Machine. If you don’t see a file-list at the left of the window, then press the ‘Show Log List’ button and select the proper file. The system.log contains a lot of information, so you need to filter on the apple.backupd string. The logging shows:
- Where the Time Machine backup is stored.
- How many space is required for the backup and if it needed to delete old backups to make space.
- Deleted backups, because they have expired. These are most often the hourly backups of the day before.
- How many files are copied during this backup.
- Any errors that occurred when copying the files.
A typical session should look something like this:
BackupLoupe
Sometimes, the Time Machine backups are very large and you cannot explain why, then probably one or more large files are modified and need to be backed up regularly. Typical examples are virtual machines, Entourage’s datafile, iTunes library, … It’s a good idea to exclude these files or directories from Time Machine, but make sure you backup these files using a different method.
If you want to know what is in each Time Machine backup, then you definitely should take a look at BackupLoupe. It’s an easy to use utility that allows you to peek in the Time Machine backups, so you know exactly what is in each backup. The application costs only €1.49, which can be payed using PayPal. You can try the application for free though, but I recommend to pay for this application. It’s worth it.