This is a continuation of an earlier post I did on Time Machine. While investigating all the many Time Machine features and issues, I discovered a nice add-on tool called tms. It currently is in beta and only exists as a command-line tool. It interacts with the Time Machine database on the Time Machine destination (physical disk or network) and provides some very useful information:

snapshots – List the snapshots present on the destination

$ tms snapshots
/Volumes/Backup1/Backups.backupdb/media/2008-09-06-193341: num=5760 state=4 type=2 ver=1 start=2008-09-06-19:22:21.618534 complete=2008-09-06-19:33:41.893965
/Volumes/Backup1/Backups.backupdb/media/2008-09-06-153237: num=5759 state=4 type=2 ver=1 start=2008-09-06-15:16:21.145156 complete=2008-09-06-15:32:37.095843
/Volumes/Backup1/Backups.backupdb/media/2008-09-06-113449: num=5758 state=4 type=2 ver=1 start=2008-09-06-11:17:09.578714 complete=2008-09-06-11:34:49.347916
{snip}

snaplog – List all the log detail for the latest (or specified) backup. I won’t paste it here as it is very verbose and quite informative.

log – List the revisions of a particular file

$ tms log wp_ozh_adminmenu.php 
/Volumes/Backup1/Backups.backupdb/media/2008-02-28-002700/path/to/wp_ozh_adminmenu.php: num=2658 oldest=2008-02-24-22:18:09 newest=2008-04-18-22:56:42
/Volumes/Backup1/Backups.backupdb/media/2008-05-27-004103/path/to/wp_ozh_adminmenu.php: num=4630 oldest=2008-05-26-00:23:11 newest=Current

delta – List the differences between two backups

$ tms delta 5760 5759
delta: 5760 vs 5759
/Volumes/MediaHD/.DS_Store: !=
/Volumes/MediaHD/private/var/amavis/tmp/amavis-20080906T154248-92402: ->
/Volumes/MediaHD/private/var/amavis/tmp/amavis-20080906T130623-87446: <-
/Volumes/MediaHD/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPod.plist: !=
/Volumes/MediaHD/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist: !=
{snip again}

For the notation at the end of the line, != means the file is in both backups but are different (e.g., it changed), <- means the file is in the later backup but not in the earlier, and -> means the file is in the earlier but not later.

diff – Display the differences between two backups of a file using the diff command. For some reason, this doesn’t work for me.

I’ve used tms to help isolate what is being backed up and since I am running Leopard Server, there are many changing files that I have excluded which has reduced the amount of data being backed up.