TinkerTool System 7

Known Issues

There are currently no known problems that require additional documentation.

Release Notes

The privacy feature of macOS that grants TinkerTool System access to the full disk may fail if you have multiple copies of TinkerTool System on your computer: As noted in the chapter Basic Operations: Privacy Policy Settings of your Mac, you have to approve that TinkerTool System has permission for Full Disk Access before you can use all features of the application. When you store multiple copies of TinkerTool System on your Mac however, this approval may fail unexpectedly. TinkerTool System may indicate that it does not have the necessary approval although it was given previously.

Workaround: This is a known design flaw of the Privacy feature of macOS. The protection feature can be confused when working with multiple copies of the same application. Use the following steps to ensure that macOS grants permission to the intended copy of the software:

  1. Identify all copies of TinkerTool System of your computer, e.g. by using Spotlight.
  2. Delete all superfluous copies, keeping the correct one.
  3. In System Preferences, go to Security & Privacy > Privacy > Full Disk Access, authorize as administrator, and remove all entries for TinkerTool System and TinkerToolSystem-PrivilegedTool if available.
  4. Re-add the entry for TinkerTool System.

Note that you can always keep backup copies of TinkerTool System on your Time Machine disks. This may not work when using third-party backup applications, however.

The size values for APFS snapshots on inactive operating system volumes can be wrong: Current versions of macOS are unable to determine the private size of APFS snapshots correctly if the snapshots belong to a volume of another macOS installation on your computer. In this case, you may receive a private size of zero and a tide mark at the 4.61 exabyte position.

Workaround: There is no known workaround. Apple’s Disk Utility is also affected by this issue.

If you specify a time interval while querying the system log, specific versions of macOS may return incorrect data in case the time interval is a few seconds around the startup time of a Mac with Apple Silicon: If you use the feature Info > Logs to get an excerpt from the system log and you specify a time interval targeting the first boot phase of an Apple Silicon processor exactly, macOS will often return an incomplete or empty log as result.

Workaround: This is a defect in current versions of macOS. It is currently unknown when and if Apple will fix this issue. As a workaround, you can try to shift the time interval by a small amount, e.g. by 10 seconds after the startup time. In most cases, macOS will then provide the correct excerpt from the logs. Macs with Intel processors are generally not affected by this problem.

Privileged operations fail after a downgrade of the application: The security features of TinkerTool System won’t work as expected if you use a copy of the application and later use a copy with a lower version number. In this case, operations that require to be authorized by an administrator may no longer work. You will receive an error message instead, indicating that a “trust failure” has occurred.

Workaround: We strongly advise against any kind of downgrade of the software. However, if using an older version cannot be avoided for some reason, you’ll have to make sure that the version of the privileged tool currently running in macOS is matching the version that came with the version of TinkerTool System you like to use. Perform the following steps:

  1. In the running copy, select the menu item Reset > Remove Security Component….
  2. Follow the instructions the program is giving. The program will quit itself as last step of this operation.
  3. Launch the version of TinkerTool System you like to use.