Backups and disks

Time Machine from Terminal

You can enable sudo tmutil enable or disable sudo tmutil disable from the command line. If you want to run a Time Machine backup right away, just run tmutil startbackup or tmutil stopbackup if you ever want to stop a backup.

Local snapshots

The following command will disable and delete “local snapshots”:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

You can turn local snapshots back on by running:

sudo tmutil enablelocal

Exclude selected folders

sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/Downloads

There is an interesting property -p that controls whether or not the folder remains in exclusion when it is moved. If you use the above command with the -p flag, then it will not be sticky.

If you are a developer there are a few quite common folders that should be excluded:

sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/.composer
sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/.npm
sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/Library/Developer
sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/

List excluded

sudo mdfind "com_apple_backup_excludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"

Time Machine stats

tmutil listbackups

Delete local Time Machine snapshots

Your Time Machine backup disk might not always be available, so Time Machine also stores some of its backups on your Mac. These backups are called local snapshots. Local TimeMachine snapshots take a large amount of disk space. This space is listed as purgeable in disk info, but cannot be actually used until the system decides to free it up. You can list all local backups with:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Then delete one by one, with follow command:

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <snapshot date>

You can lists all snaphosts and deletes all of them in a loop:

for d in $(tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates | grep "-"); do sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $d; done

Backup iCloud Drive with rclone

All iCloud drive data are located in ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ folder. You can easily sync them with rclone to back up hard drive connected to Mac. In my case it will be mounted to /Volumes/Backup/.

rclone sync ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ /Volumes/Backup/iCloudDriveBackup --copy-links

If you need also backup of all deleted files (sync usually remove files that was delete from source) is there --backup-dir parameter.

rclone sync ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ /Volumes/Backup/iCloudDriveBackup --copy-links
       --backup-dir="/Volumes/Backup/iCloudDriveArchive/$(date +%Y)/$(date +%F_%T)"

Clean flash drive before unmount

How to clean flash drive and delete all hidden (dot) files on mac before unmount? It’s simple, save follow commands as flash:

#!/bin/bash

if [ -n "$1" ]; then
  read -r -p "Clean /Volumes/$1/ and unmount? [y/N] " response
  if [[ $response =~ ^([yY][eE][sS]|[yY])$ ]]; then
    find /Volumes/$1/ -name '._*' -type f -delete
    rm -rf /Volumes/$1/.Spotlight-V100/
    rm -rf /Volumes/$1/.Trashes/
    diskutil unmount /Volumes/$1/
    echo "Done..."
  fi
else
  echo "Flash drive name missing"
fi

Then change the access mode of a file chmod +x flash. To unmount a clean flash drive just run ./flash Flashka (Flashka is name od drive).