There is a huge amount of information here, most of which is unintelligible to Mac users, and which can readily consume hours of your time.

logs/oslog.archive is a dump of the entire new-style log which can be read into Console and browsed there.

logs/install.log is the last macOS update log,.

Beware, though – it is very large, normally over 100 MB, mdsdiagnostic/system_logs.archive is a dump of your entire system log which can be read into Console and browsed there.

configuration/exclusions.txt contains a useful list of your exclusions from backups, and those set by macOS,.

there are full diagnostics on Spotlight, because of the role of its metadata in retrieving information from backups,.

brctl contains lots of detailed information about iCloud,.

details current settings for the backupd-helper daemon,.

backup_destinations contains a complete analysis of your backups, with the log for each one,.

What you get is around half a gigabyte of bewildering detail. Which will save the zipped archive into your Documents folder, for example. It is only accessible from the command line, and when invoked will spend the next few minutes generating a zipped archive of around 290 MB of extracts from logs and much else: it is the Time Machine equivalent of the general sysdiagnose command. You can then browse your logs using Consolation or the Terminal command log show, but it can be difficult to recognise what is going wrong, and even tougher to work out how to fix it.Īpple provides a monster of a tool, tmdiagnose, to help its own support engineers work out what is going wrong with Time Machine. If your problem is that Time Machine backups are not being started at all, or are only occurring irregularly, then I have explained how you can trace the fault, and given details of the sequence of events which results in a backup being made.īut many problems with Time Machine occur during attempts to back up, when the process aborts with an error message, or, even worse, simply gets stuck and never completes the backup. Once you have turned it off and back on again, and restarted, you will probably be running out of ideas. There are only a few things that you can do to try to address Time Machine problems using normal ‘friendly’ tools such as the Time Machine pane in System Preferences.

Nomachine mac m1