How long should you expect your Mac’s log to retain entries? Evidence here suggests that anything beyond 5 days isn’t looking good, and expecting to retrieve those made more than 5 days ago is likely to fail.
LogUI
New version adds more detail to the list of log files, and a new graphical view to pick out anomalies in up to 6 weeks of previous log records.
How to browse log entries for an event that occurred many days after its entries have been removed from the active log, by discovering its exact time and the processes involved.
A new app to analyse the size of log entries written by different processes over the last few weeks or months, Logistician. First release version for Sonoma and later.
The older AppKit API supports seconds in its Date Picker, but they’ve been dropped from its SwiftUI successor. There are many other signs our Macs are moving to less precise time. Is this intentional, to reverse our slavery to time?
When something has gone wrong, if you don’t know what to look for in the log, nor when it happened, the log is hostile. It also leaves important entries without the user being aware of them. Here are ideas of how those could be improved.
Catch up on your reading with selected articles from the past year, covering security, logs, macOS generally, Spotlight in particular, and some utilities.
Several utilities access the log. When there are problems getting entries, they each report details. Here’s what each error report means, and what you can do to fix it.
Log entries mentioning errors are common and can mislead. Those marking the consequences of errors may not mention the word error. Turn detective to work out where the error really is with these tips.
What happens when you can’t solve a problem, so you get a log extract and ask Claude to diagnose it for you? Here’s a full worked example.
The Eclectic Light Company 