tmbackup - Seamless Time Machine backups! 🚀

Fast, light macOS utility that performs Time Machine backups on all connected drives.

Generated using agg, asciinema, Menlo typeface, theme Github Dark.

Highlights

• 🚀 Fast - minimal overhead, tmbackup.awk executes in only ~ 15 ms.¹
• 🎨 Intuitive - user-friendly, clear color-coded messages for every backup status.
• 🔒 Robust - ensures reliability with effective error handling during the backup.
• 📦 Self-contained - no dependencies, lightweight, uses POSIX awk, sh (e.g. 3629 bytes, 186 lines).

Getting Started

Note

This utility is only intended to work in macOS.

Installation

If you have brew installed, just run:

$ brew install Neved4/tap/tmbackup

Usage

$ ./tmbackup.sh

Logging

tmbackup | tee -a /path/to/output.log

Compatibility

Supported macOS Versions

Version	Supported
macOS 14 Sonoma	Yes ✅
macOS 13 Ventura	Yes ✅
macOS 12 Monterey	Yes ✅
macOS 11 Big Sur	Yes ✅

Supported Awk and UNIX shells

tmbackup is built for macOS using /bin/sh and /usr/bin/awk. It adheres to standards when possible, and is made to play nicely with other Awk and POSIX sh versions too.

This allows to execute tmbackup with different shells:

dash /path/to/tmbackup.sh

Or to build your own parsing with different Awk implementations:

tmutil destinationinfo | mawk -f /path/to/tmbackup.awk

Supported Awk implementations

Shell	Version	Supported
awk	20230909	✅ Yes
gawk	5.3.0	✅ Yes
goawk	1.25.0	✅ Yes
mawk	1.3.4-20231126	✅ Yes

Supported shells

Shell	Version	Supported
bash	5.2.15	✅ Yes
dash	0.5.12	✅ Yes
ksh93	93u+m/1.0.7	✅ Yes
mksh	59c	✅ Yes
oksh	7.3	✅ Yes
osh	0.18.0	✅ Yes
posh	0.14.1	❌ No
yash	2.55	✅ Yes
zsh	5.9	✅ Yes

UX & Implementation

More information on this topic: UX.md.

Note

If you have any cool ideas or suggestions to improve things, let me know!

Limitations

Important

tmbackup does not differentiate between backups interrupted by a hardware failure and a user manually skipping.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to @0risc and @goldbuick for testing and feedback.

License

tmbackup is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.

See the LICENSE file for details.

Related Projects

• matteocorti/tmstatus.sh - general overview and stats
• torstenvl/tmutils - history, marking and deduplication
• emrekaankocoglu/disposable-timemachine-docker - disposable container backups
• raphaelcohn/os-x-backup - encrypted backups to cloud storage
• Delvien/Timemachine-mount-usb-backup-then-dismount - mount drive, backup, dismount
• tjluoma/texbar-timemachine - monitor Time Machine status
• fedekrum/Mac-Time-Machine-status - get info on what Time Machine is doing
• tomtaylor/fix_timemachine - fix broken Time Machine NAS backups

Footnotes

1. Tested with hyperfine. ↩