Welcome

Much of the time, Time Machine backups work fine. Every hour or so, your Mac automatically makes a new backup, and when you need to retrieve something from those backups, it’s there, ready for you. But Time Machine can and does go wrong, and often doesn’t warn you that it has stopped making backups regularly, has stopped working altogether, or that errors have occurred. You may only discover this when you go to use your backup; it is then too late.

The Time Machine Mechanic, T2M2 for short, is an easy-to-use tool which checks that your backups are being made correctly. It tells you details such as how much has been backed up, and when. It reports any errors which have occurred, and keeps you fully informed about what has been going on with Time Machine. It can also help you identify folders and other items which are slowing a backup down, so you can exclude them and make backups faster.

⚠️ It does so by analysing Apple’s unified log system, and therefore only works on Sierra and later. Log access is only possible when you are logged in as an admin user. For T2M2 to work, you therefore have to be logged in as an admin user. If the current user isn’t a member of the admin group (80), T2M2 shows an alert and will quit when you dismiss that.

T2M2 looks at log entries written by Time Machine when it makes backups.

T2M2 has a simple and clean interface: open a new window using the New command in the File menu, and the top section of that window shows its controls.

At the left, set the time period in hours which you want T2M2 to analyse. Do this by editing the number directly, or by using the stepper control next to it. You can enter any period from 1 to 48 hours.

Once that is set, check your backups over that last period of hours by clicking on the Check Time Machine button. ➜ Check backups

To the right of that button is a ‘traffic light’ signal. At this stage, because you have not done anything, it remains grey.

If Time Machine is stuck still making a backup that has taken a long time, or has recently completed one, set the time period to cover that backup and click on the Check Speed button. ➜ Check speed

If your Mac is running macOS 11 Big Sur, an additional button labelled APFS will be available, to perform ➜ APFS checks.

If you want T2M2 to tell Time Machine to make a backup now, click on the Back up now button. ➜ Make a backup

T2M2 displays full results in the scrolling text area below. To interpret those in detail ➜ Interpret result .

You can enlarge the size of the font used in the text area by pressing ⌘ + , or reduce it by pressing ⌘ – . That size and the current window position are saved as defaults for when you next open a window in T2M2.

T2M2 now automatically checks whether there is an ➜ update available for it, and offers to download it when available.

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