Time Machine is the name of Apple’s technology which automatically creates backup copies of your computer’s hard drives. Backups are created silently in the background, typically every hour. Outdated file sets are automatically removed, keeping hourly backups for the last day, daily backups for the last month, and monthly backups until the destination device is full. Each backup set contains a nearly complete snapshot of the contents of all disks for which Time Machine has been activated. “Nearly” means that Time Machine automatically omits files which are considered unimportant or which can be recreated, like log files, the Trash, caches, the Spotlight search index, etc. As of macOS 11, this also includes the operating system itself. Although your files can be restored for each point in time for which a backup is available, Time Machine technically only stores the differences between any two given consecutive backup operations (incremental backup). Differences are handled at the file level, i.e. if a single byte in a file X has changed, the entire file X will be copied during the next Time Machine backup run.
Time Machine can be configured to work with multiple destination devices at the same time. In addition to disk drives, destination devices can be servers in the network (such as Time Capsule), a Mac running Time Machine file sharing (available in old versions of macOS Server and in standard versions of macOS as of version 10.13), or a NAS with Time Machine support. TinkerTool System automatically detects your configuration and always works on the Time Machine destination that is currently defined by macOS to be the “active” one.
The name and type of the destination are shown in the upper box of the Time Machine pane. For disk-based backups, the name of the volume is shown at Destination. Network-based backups are indicated by a headline with the notice network mode. The upper box also shows whether automatic backups are currently enabled, and if a successful maintenance connection between TinkerTool System and Time Machine could be established. If an error occurred, e.g. if the current privacy settings of your computer don’t permit that you access Time Machine disks, this will be noted in the upper box.
If you use the modern APFS version of Time Machine (see next section), the line Destination will also indicate whether the backup is encrypted. In addition, the line Automatic backups will contain a notice which backup time interval is currently set.
As of macOS 11, the technology of Time Machine has been strongly extended and modified: While earlier versions of the operating system only accepted destination volumes for backups that had been formatted with the file system Mac OS Extended (HFS+), backups onto the Apple File System (APFS) are now possible as well. If Time Machine is freshly configured for a new backup disk, it will use APFS and will operate in “modern” mode. When taking over old backup sets initially created with macOS 10, OS X, or Mac OS X, Time Machine will continue working with HFS+.
The feature sets between the macOS 10 and the modern variants of Time Machine are very different. For this reason, TinkerTool System uses different panes to control Time Machine depending on which variant is detected. If running in macOS 10 mode, the respective pane will identify as Time Machine X.
This manual contains two different chapters for the use of both the panes Time Machine X and Time Machine.
TinkerTool System won’t switch the Time Machine mode of operation while it is running. When you swap the destination disk from HFS+ to APFS while TinkerTool System is open, the application will notice this the next time you will be preparing a maintenance operation and shows an error message in this case. You can simply quit and reopen the program to resolve this situation.