FAQ

BackupLoupe is provided as a compressed Archive. Double-clicking it in Finder will extract the program which you can move to your Applications folder.

Yes, it is! If you have configured Time Machine to use NAS BackupLoupe will show the network share in the Disk Manager. Mount it from there to see its contents. Then mount the backup bundle of the host you are interested in.

Note: I do not recommend using NAS for Time Machine backups. Time Machine relies on sparse-bundle disk images for backups to NAS. If a sparse-bundle gets corrupted your chances to recover your backups are minimal.

Remove the problematic backup destination from Time Machine and unmount the Time Machine network share. Then disable the Time Machine service on your NAS and Mount the network share intended for use by Time Machine. Add the backup destination again.

The time it takes to scan a snapshot is directly related to the number of items that have been backed up. Snapshots on NAS are much slower to access than snapshots on local storage (USB, Thunderbolt, …). Snapshots with thousands of backed up files on local storage are likely indexed seconds. A snapshot with hundreds of thousands of files backed up on NAS might take several hours.

The left bar indicates the relative size of a snapshot; that is the absolute size of a snapshot in proportion to the time span that snapshot covers. Green indicates a small relative size, and red indicates a large one.

The right bar indicates the deviation of a snapshot’s relative size from the average relative size of all snapshots made of the current machine. Green indicates a snapshot with a size close to average relative size, and red indicates an unusually small or large snapshot.

Time Machine Preferences show only the excluded paths which still exist. Once they are created again they will be displayed again.

BackupLoupe requires a dedicated file comparison utility to be installed to answer this question. FileMerge.app, a utility which is part of the Apple Developer Tools, is a free option. Other 3rd-party utilities are supported as well. Once installed proceed as follows:

• Locate the file in the browser view
• Open the history drawer
• Right-click the revision you want to compare the file to; A popup menu will appear
• Select 'Show differences'

BackupLoupe 3 is pretty much a rewrite of BackupLoupe 2. It also uses a different cache format, so caches created by BackupLoupe 2 are not supported by BackupLoupe 3.

To ensure that BackupLoupe 3 can be tested without interfering with BackupLoupe 2 old indices are not touched. Once you have decided to switch to BackupLoupe 3 you can remove the old caches:

• Locate your cache directory by opening the BackupLoupe preferences, Scanner tab. The value you are interested in is "Cache folder".
• Open this cache folder in Finder
• Open Finder
• Press ⇧⌘G
• Enter the path as seen in the BackupLoupe preferences
• Press ⏎
• Remove any folder named after a backup volume. BackupLoupe 3 stores its caches in folders named after machines.

You have most likely been using a broken decompression utility to unarchive BackupLoupe. Please use the decompression utility provided with macOS.

In Finder please right-click on the archive and select Open With>Archive Utility.app from the context menu.

Please make sure that you have entered all information exactly as provided in the licensing email. Case does matter! Also double-check if the license key has been issued for the software version you are trying to register.

This is not exactly a frequently asked question, but It might be of interest to some.

Paste this in Terminal.app on an administrator account on your Mac:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://www.soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/uninstall-backuploupe.sh)"

You can also download the script and execute it manually.