To protect against accidental-and deliberate-damage, OS X uses the concept of users and super users. It is possible to entirely break a Mac if you aren’t careful. When you are using the Terminal, you have access to many parts of OS X that are impossible to get to normally. For example, entering tmutil help enable will describe what the enable command does and inform you that it needs root privileges to run. Terminal will then provide detailed information about it. Enter tmutil help where is the command you want more information on. To get more information on a single tmutil command, there is no need to root through the manual. The command man-short for manual-does the same for many other Terminal commands. Luckily, there are a number of help features built in.Īlthough it is unlikely to make much sense at the moment, to get a complete list of all the available tmutil commands-along with what they do and how to use them-enter man tmutil into Terminal. Getting StartedĬontrolling a computer from the command line is notorious for having a steep learning curve. The tmutil commands will not work otherwise. Once you have got the basics down, however, the more complicated commands will be easy to understand.īefore starting this tutorial, it’s important to note that a Time Machine drive must be connected to the Mac you are using. To cover every tmutil command in detail would require far more than just one article. This tutorial will introduce, and provide an overview of, controlling Time Machine from the Terminal. Through the Time Machine utility Terminal command-abbreviated to tmutil-you can control any aspect of a Time Machine setup, and also find out more information about it.

Time Machine is very simple to set up and use, however, if you want more control over it, you’ll need to break out one of OS X’s oldest applications: Terminal.

In a previous tutorial, I showed how to get started with Time Machine, OS X’s built in backup utility.

Mac terminal commands time set