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The Time Machine control panel gives information on in-progress backups. For example

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Is there a way to get the information from the command line?

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6 Answers 6

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While the backup is running, detailed information gan be gained by

tmutil status

which should return something like this:

Backup session status: { BackupPhase = Copying; ClientID = "com.apple.backupd"; DateOfStateChange = "2014-12-18 14:14:21 +0000"; DestinationID = "B4AF88-5AD5-49BE-B254-650B44E20499"; DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/TimeMachine"; Percent = "0.852581430477103"; Progress = { TimeRemaining = 0; "_raw_totalBytes" = 38596759; bytes = 36563200; files = 480; totalBytes = 42456434; totalFiles = 480; }; Running = 1; Stopping = 0; "_raw_Percent" = "0.9473127005301144"; }

If you only care for the percentage, try the following (looks ugly, works only if there is a percentage to display):

tmutil status | awk '/_raw_Percent/ {print $3}' | grep -o '[0-9].[0-9]\+\(e-[0-9]\+\)\?' | awk '{print $1*100}'

Updated 10 years later:

To better parse tmutil's plist output using builtin methods, you need to remove the initial line with tail and then convert it to JSON via plutil:

tmutil status | tail -n +2 | plutil -convert json -o - -- - | jq

Note that the pipe into jq is given here only for nicer formatting. To directly access individual values, instead use e.g.: | jq '.["BackupPhase"]'

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    I couldn't find this in the manpage. Where did you glean this verb for tmutil? Commented Dec 8, 2016 at 2:38
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    @jsejcksn To be honest, I don't remember where I found out about status, running tmutil help status now returns *** status is a private verb. ***; why this is the case and especially if this was the case two years ago, I don't know :D Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 9:42
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    What is the format of the data from tmutil? It's not quite JSON. Is it some kind of C object dump? Commented Jan 27, 2018 at 16:44
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    @LS this is formatted as a NeXTSTEP-style property list Commented Feb 5, 2018 at 9:07
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    @muescha Thanks for bringing this old post back onto my radar, I've now updated my answer to also include a conversion to JSON using only builtin tools. Commented Jan 26, 2024 at 9:41
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To get only the percentage value:

tmutil status | LC_NUMERIC="C" awk -F'"' '/_raw_Percent/ {print $4 * 100}'
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  • Thank you! I used this with the watch command like this watch -n 2 "tmutil status | LC_NUMERIC='C' awk -F'\"' '/_raw_Percent/ {print \$4 * 100}'" to get an update e.g., every 2 seconds. Commented Oct 23, 2023 at 23:58
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I managed to make a simple script from the accepted answer.

tmstatus () { eval $(tmutil status | grep -E '[^}];$' | perl -p -e 's/^\s+[\"]*//g;' -e 's/[\"]*\s+\=\s+/=/g') || (echo "Something get wrong..." && return 1) if [[ $Running -eq 1 ]] then export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" [[ $BackupPhase == "Copying" ]] && Percent=$(printf '%0.2f%%' `bc <<< $Percent*100`) && echo "${DateOfStateChange} ${BackupPhase} backup to ${DestinationMountPoint}: ${totalFiles} files - ${Percent} (~$((${TimeRemaining:-0}/60)) min." || echo "${DateOfStateChange} ${BackupPhase} (Destination ${DestinationID})." else echo "TimeMachine backup is not running." fi }
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Maybe a bit more complicated but also more practical for processing, the following command will write the progress status into a plist file and convert it into json:

tmutil status | grep -v 'Backup session status' > a.plist; plutil -convert json a.plist

Json can be parsed more easily to extract various information.

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0

I used @Atika's very helpful script but sometimes got errors like

bash: 26520.80484282512/60: syntax error: invalid arithmetic operator (error token is ".80484282512/60")

So I made a slight tweak to pass that division operation to bc and now it works reliably (caveat: for me!):

Before:

(~$((${TimeRemaining:-0}/60)) min."

After:

(~$(bc <<< ${TimeRemaining:-0}/60) min.)

Updated Script:

tmstatus () { eval $(tmutil status | grep -E '[^}];$' | perl -p -e 's/^\s+[\"]*//g;' -e 's/[\"]*\s+\=\s+/=/g') || (echo "Something get wrong..." && return 1) if [[ $Running -eq 1 ]] then export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" [[ $BackupPhase == "Copying" ]] && Percent=$(printf '%0.2f%%' $(bc <<< $Percent*100)) && echo "${DateOfStateChange} ${BackupPhase} backup to ${DestinationMountPoint}: ${totalFiles} files - ${Percent} (~$(bc <<< ${TimeRemaining:-0}/60) min.)" || echo "${DateOfStateChange} ${BackupPhase} (Destination ${DestinationID})." else echo "TimeMachine backup is not running." fi }
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I did a script for this that can be executed from Terminal.

https://github.com/fedekrum/Mac-Time-Machine-status

#!/bin/bash # Check if we're root and re-run if not. if [ $(id -u) -ne 0 ]; then echo "Script not running as root, trying to elevate to root..." sudo bash "$0" "$@" exit $? fi clear # Get the PID of the process "/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd" PID=$(ps -ef | awk '$8=="'/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd'" {print $2}') # If the process is not found, it alerts the user and quits if [ -z "$PID" ]; then echo "The process '/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd' is not running" exit 1 fi clear # Loop to continuously check the status while true; do echo -e "\033[H" # Check if the output of "tmutil status" contains "ThinningPreBackup" if tmutil status | grep -q "ThinningPreBackup"; then # If it does, run "lsof -p $PID" and show the last line as the status echo printf "$(lsof -p $PID | tail -n 1 | awk -F'/[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{6}' '{print substr($2, 2)}')\n" else # If it doesn't, show the result of "tmutil status" echo printf "$(tmutil status)\n" fi # Get the width of the terminal width=$(tput cols) # Generate a line filled with spaces line=$(printf '%*s' $width) # Do it for three lines for i in {1..3}; do # Print a carriage return and the line of spaces, effectively overwriting the current line with spaces echo -en "\r$line\r" # Move to the next line echo done # Wait for 10 seconds before the next round for i in {10..1}; do echo -e "\033[H" echo "$i " sleep 1 done done
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  • Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please edit to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 9:46
  • Link only answers are not appreciated, especially if your GitHub account goes, then your answer is worthless. At least provide a copy of the script here (like other answers do), and explain it's workings. Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 9:49

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