There are many occasions when you might want to open not the live logs being collected on a Mac, but those which have been captured on another drive, Mac, or device (iOS, watchOS, tvOS).

As I have explained, the current way of doing this is from a logarchive bundle. This is a structured folder, with the extension .logarchive, which conforms to an undocumented Apple format. The snag with logarchives is that they can become huge: convert the logs from a Mac startup volume into one, and you could have log entries extending back over twenty days, giving you more than 25 million log entries to browse.

In the great majority of cases, you only want to examine one of the log files contained within your logarchive.

You can open logarchives using the log command in Terminal, Apple’s bundled Console app, or Consolation. However, Console does not allow you to select individual log files within an archive. Until this new version of Consolation 3, neither did Consolation.

This new version lets you choose whether to open the whole logarchive, or just one .tracev3 log file within it.

The snag, though, is that there in no simple tool which will turn, say, the relevant folders containing logs in /var/db into a proper logarchive: I am working on that at present, in another tool MakeLogarchive. Once that is complete, this should give great flexibility.

This new beta-test version of Consolation 3 is available here consolation3b9
and in Downloads above. It also fixes a couple of minor bugs.

I am working on making MakeLogarchive fully functional as soon as I can.