BackupLoupe

One Stop Shop for Time Machine

With Mac OS Leopard Apple introduced Time Machine. BackupLoupe offers an alternative GUI for Apple’s Backup Software which allows you to

What’s new in Version 3?

Table of contents

The User Interface

Main Window

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Screenshot

Disk Manager

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Screenshot

Working with BackupLoupe

Before you start

Before you can do anything useful with BackupLoupe you have to index your snapshots. For this you have to connect and mount your backup disks. If you backup to local storage (USB, Thunderbolt, FireWire, …) it is sufficient to connect the disk. BackupLoupe will recognize it and show a list of snapshots. If you are using network storage you need to mount the backup bundle of your machine. To do this open the Disk Manager and select the Mount symbol next to the backup bundle of your host.

Mounting backup bundles from NAS sometimes takes several minutes. Be patient.

Sometimes BackupLoupe fails to mount a backup bundle complaining that the resource is temporarily unavailable. In this case please disconnect the Time Machine network share from your Mac and disable the Time Machine service on your NAS. Remove the network destination in the Time Machine preferences, mount your Time Machine network share via Finder and add the backup destination again.

When mounting a backup bundle via Disk Manager (or via Finder) macOS may present you a warning like this one:
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You can safely ignore this warning.

Indexing

General

BackupLoupe can create indexes of your Time Machine backups with the privileges of the current user or with root privileges. The latter requires you to enter admin credentials but allows you to get a complete index while an index created with your user’s privileges contains only items that this user can see.

To index using root privileges enable Use privileged scanner in the Scanner section of BackupLoupe’s preferences.

Manual Indexing

Indexing your snapshots can be done by clicking the Refresh button of the snapshot. If you want to index several snapshots at once you can open the gear menu next to the host popup and select Index new snapshots. If you have multiple backup disks configured and would like to limit indexing to only one of them click on the disclosure triangle to the left of the hosts popup. Then open the gear menu of the volume you’d like to process and select Index new snapshots. This action will index all snapshots that have not been indexed yet. The command Index all snapshots will overwrite existing cache files.

Automatic Indexing

BackupLoupe can check for new snapshots periodically and auto-index new snapshots when they are found. Indexing is performed by a background task and BackupLoupe does not have to be running for this to work. Enable this feature in the Monitor section of the BackupLoupe preferences. Enable Global Monitoring if you have privileged scanning enabled, Local Monitoring otherwise.

Automatic indexing does only work for backups on local storage!

Locating items

The Browser

To find out which items occupy the most space on your backup disk start by looking at the color codes of the snapshot list. Select one which has an unusually large relative size. Once selected the browser will show the contents of the snapshot. By default items are ordered by size with the largest items showing up on top.

Several actions are available from the browser context menu by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on an item.

Items which currently do not exist on the “live” filesystem are displayed with a slanted font.

The History View

The History View searches all connected backup disks for backups of the item selected in the Browser. Use this view to quickly examine the backups of an item (the space key for QuickLook works here as well).

All actions available in the Browser are also available from the history context menu by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on an item.

In the top section of the browser view you can see the accumulated size of an item in all snapshots. Sometimes a rather small file is modified very often and is thus backed up every time.

You can see which backup volume a snapshot is on by comparing the small colored dot with the volume indicator in the volumes section above the snapshot list in the right section of the main window.

For an explenation of the symbols please see the annotated screenshot.

The Find Window

If you already know he name of the item you are looking for it may be quicker to use BackupLoupe’s Find Window. It works very much like the search functionality in Finder.

All actions available in the Browser are also available from the Find context menu by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on an item.

You can also double-click on an item in the result list to select it in the Browser.

Items which currently do not exist on the “live” filesystem are displayed with a slanted font.

Find relies on indexes. It can only find an item if it is contained in an index.

From Finder / other applications

BackupLoupe installs the service Show Time Machine Revisions which is available from the services menu. Right-click (or control-click) on an item in Finder and select the service from the services submenu. BackupLoupe will be started and the item will be searched for.

Excluding items from future backups

The Excluded Items panel

This panel shows which volumes and folders are currently excluded from backups. There are several ways to add items to this list.

1) Use the menu item “Exclude from future backups” in the context menus of the Browser and the Find window.
2) Drag an item from the Broser onto the list of excluded items.
3) Select an item in the Browser and click the + button below the list of excluded items.

You can remove an item from the list of excluded items by selecting it clicking the - button below the list.

Restoring items

Restore to original location

Select the item/version you want to restore in the Browser, Find window or History view. Right-click (or control-click) on it and select “Restore…” from the context menu.

Restore to other location

Open a Finder window and navigate to the folder you’d like to restore to. Now select the item/version you want to restore in the Browser, Find window or History view and drag it on the Finder window. This should work with any drag&drop enabled filemanager.

Merge or replace

If the folder you are restoring to already contains a folder with the same name as the one you are trying to restore BackupLoupe will ask you if you’d like to merge or replace the folder. Replace will replace the current version with the backup. Merge will only overwrite files which are in the backup. Other files/folders won’t be touched.

Full or partial

If you are restoring a folder BackupLoupe will ask you if you’d like a full or a partial restore. Restore all items will restore the complete folder just as it appeared at the time of the backup. Restore only backed up items will restore only the items which have been backed up. Items inside this folder which have not changed since the previous backup (and thus have not been backed up in this snapshot) won’t be restored.

Statistics

BackupLoupe provides simple statistics for hosts and volumes. Choose Show statistics from the host or disk action menu to show statistics.

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Removing indexes

You can remove an individual index by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on the snapshot in the snapshot list and selecting Remove cache from the popup menu.

Remove all indexes of backups from a host open the host action menu and select Remove indexes….

Remove all indexes of backups of a host on a specific backup disk click on the disclosure triangle to the left of the host name to show all backup volumes holding snapshots of this host. Now open the disk action menu of the backup disk and select Remove indexes….

BackupLoupe provides a basic statistic view. It

Removing a Snapshot

Please note that this is a destructive operation. It will permanently remove part of your backup!

Right-click (or control-click) on a snapshot while holding down the option key. Select Remove snapshot… from the menu.

Controlling Time Machine

The right-most section of the Status View of the main window shows the current Time Machine status. It also allows for a bit of control.

auto

The “auto” button switches automatic backups on or off. When working with backups on NAS it is recommended to disable automatic backups to avoid conflicts with Time Machine. BackupLoupe will ask you to turn it back on when you quit BackupLoupe so you don’t accidentally go without backups.

turbo

If turbo is enabled macOS will no longer throttle Time Machine (and other processes with low priority) by setting the system information debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled to 0 via sysctl(3). This may result in much improved performance when creating large snapshots. The switch has to be on before the backup is started. Already running processes are not affected by it. The switch should generally be switched off.

Aborting the current Time Machine operation

When Time Machine is performing a backup or when it is verifying a backup the Status View shows a progress bar. Clicking on the button to the right will abort the current operation.

Configuring BackupLoupe

The configuration panel is split into five sections.

Scanner

This section allows you to switch between privileged and unprivileged indexing. If you enable Use privileged scanner you will be scanning your backups as the privileged user root. An unprivileged scanner will have the permissions of the current user which has restricted access to some areas of the filesystem.

To enable privileged indexing your user account has to join the group com.soma-zone.BackupLoupe. When you start using version 3 of BackupLoupe this group does not yet exist. The panel opened by clicking Setup group… in this section allows you to create this group and to add your user account to this group. This group is required as a security measure. BackupLoupe 3 stores indexes created by a privileged scanner in a shared location. These indexes are owned by user root and said group. Only users belonging to this group are allowed to read these indexes.

A scanner creates indexes in a user configurable location depending on the privileges it runs with. By default indexes created by unprivileged scanners are stored in ~/Library/BackupLoupe while indexes created by privileged scanners are stored in the shared location /Library/BackupLoupe. The shared cache location will be shown if you have enabled privileged scanning. The private cache location will be shown otherwise. The cache location can be changed by clicking the Change… button. Please note that the shared cache location is shared by any user using BackupLoupe with a privileged scanner.

The option Index new snapshots automatically will do just that. When you start BackupLoupe it will automatically start a scanner for snapshots which have not been indexed yet. Snapshots appearing while BackupLoupe is running will also be indexed. In addition you may want to enable Index outdated snapshots automatically to take care of indexes which don’t reflect the current situation anymore because Time Machine has modified the backup since their creation.

Monitor

To make sure you always have up-to-date indexes to work with you can enable Snapshot Monitoring in BackupLoupe. If enabled BackupLoupe will install a background process which checks for new snapshots and outdated indexes every hour.

There are two monitoring modes: Local Monitoring does not require admin privileges. Index files are created by a scanner running with the privileges of your user account. Only files/folders visible by you will be in this index. Global Monitoring on the other hand does require admin privileges. The index files are created by a scanner with root privileges and contain a every item in the snapshot.

Display

Sizes

File sizes can be reported in decimal (kB, MB, GB, …, where 1 kB = 1000 B) or in binary (kiB, MiB, GiB, …, where 1 kiB = 1024 B).

You can choose to show all sizes of snapshots or files with dynamic units (small files with B or kB, larger ones with MB or whatever is most suitable) or with a fixed unit to make visual comparison easier. You can adjust the number of decimal places for both.

Colors

This section refers to the relative size of a snapshot. The relative size is the absolute size divided by the time span a snapshot covers. If Time Machine made a snapshot on March 15th 13:00 and another one on March 16th 14:00 then the latter would cover a time span of 25 hours. If its absolute size was 1GiB its relative size woud be about 41MiB per hour (1GiB/25h).

As the size of the initial snapshot (the first Snapshot taken of a machine on a backup volume) does not relate to the size of subsequent snapshots the initial snapshot is never taken into account for these calculations.

The color codes to the left and right of a snapshot in the snapshot list indicate its relative size and the deviation of its relative size from the average relative size of all indexed snapshots of the selected host.

The left rectangle indicates the relative size. Green indicates a small relative size and red indicates a large relative size. Don’t confuse this with the absolute size of a snapshot. A snapshot of 100GiB covering four weeks may have a green indicator while a snapshot of 200MiB covering twenty minutes may have a red one.

The right rectangle indicates the deviation. The closer a snapshot’s relative size is to the average relative size of all indexed snapshot of the selected host the greener it is. The more it deviates from this average value, the more its hue will shift to red. Use this indicator to tell unusually large or small snapshots (red) from normal ones (green).

The numeric value can be seen in the tooltips of the left and right rectangles.

Different people use their computers for different tasks, which translates to different amounts of dynamic data. You should adjust the Color code sensitiviy in a way that provides a differentiated spectrum of colors in your particular situation.

You can associate fixed size values for the upper and lower bounds of the color gradients. Use this feature to tell BackupLoupe what you consider the normal relative size range or the normal deviation range to be. If one of these values is omitted, the respective minimum/maximum value is assumed.

Example: Your snapshots are usually between 30MB and 100MB per hour, but there is one snapshot with >5GB per hour. Without further configuration you would see all regular snapshots as green while the outlier is red. But actually you want to see the size differences between the regular snaphots. In this case you can set the lower bound of the relative size to 30MB/hour and the upper bound to 100MB/hour. Snapshots below 30MB/hour are coloured green while snapshots from 100MB/hour are colored red. The snapshots in between use the full color spectrum between the configured bounds.

Other

The Browser can show items which have existed in the previous snapshot but don’t exist in the current one as deleted. Enable Show deleted items to display such items items struck through by a red line.

By default items in the browser are ordered by their size in descending order. Enabel Sort items in browser by name to change this.

An item which appears in the index but does not exist as an original (i.e. the item has been deleted since it has been backed up) can be highlighted by setting it in an oblique font. Enable Highlight items with deleted original to do that.

Time Machine stores several internal files inside the snapshot directory. They are of no particulary interest to users and are hidden by default. Enable Show Time Machine internal files to make them visible.

By disabling the option Show Recovery Partition you can hide the Recovery partition from the Browser.

Restore

You can configure BackupLoupe to keep the original timestamps for the file creation and modification date. If the option Preserve date is disabled creation and modification time will be the date and time of restoration.

When you select the option Preserve User and Group BackupLoupe will apply the original User and Group to the restored item. If disabled User and Group will match your user account.

Utilities

Comparing Items

BackupLoupe allows you to compare a backed up item to the current version. It also lets you compare two backups of a given item in History view. To do this BackupLoupe relies on external applications.

Out of the box BackupLoupe supports four products:

If you are using another diff utility you can select the last radio button in the list and enter the absolute path to your diff program along with the required command line options in the text field next to it.

Example: Apple’s FileMerge is part of Xcode. Its absolute path is /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/opendiff. Note that the file names are not mentioned, BackupLoupe adds them automatically.

Backup despite identical content

Sometimes comparing an item to the version in the preceding snapshot does not show any differences. In this case Time Machine has captured the item because the meta data of the item was modified. Choosing Why has this item been backed up? from the File menu or the popup menu of the Browser/Find/History view will open a window where the differing meta data of both versions is shown.

Path Finder integration

For the file commands “Reveal in Finder” and “Show Info” commands BackupLoupe can use Cocoatech’s Finder replaceent Path Finder.

Warnings

When you quit BackupLoupe it can perform two actions. It can enable automatic Backups by Time Machine in case they are found to be disabled and it can unmount backupbundles. By default BackupLoupe will ask what you want it to do. Your decision can be persisted. Use this preferences section if you have changed your mind about these things.