BackupLoupe is a Mac app from Soma-zone that improves greatly on Apple’s oddball Time Machine software, offering more useful, coherent and detailed information about. Jul 09, 2009 Still, BackupLoupe is a useful tool, and the developer has been adding new features quickly—the first version was released in late May, and the program has already seen several significant updates.
It would be hard to argue that Leopard’s Time Machine is not useful, or at least comforting to have around. The built-in backup feature offers a simple, set-it-and-forget-it safety net for the day you might actually need to restore files, but you don’t get much control or even oversight into what actually gets backed up. Sure, you can exclude specific folders from Time Machine’s System Preferences pane, and you can boldly fly through a gratuitous space screensaver while browsing the folders of your backups. But users—especially those who are often confused by unnecessarily lengthy backups—have been asking for a way to view more information about what is being backed up, and how large all these files are.
BackupLoupe from soma-zone attempts to answer the call of Time Machine users who are short on time or hard drive space. BackupLoupe is basically an augmented Finder-based file browser, displaying a list of your recent backups, the size of each backup, and a Column file browser with the bare essentials: file names and sizes. You can even use Quick Look to view files from your Time Machine backup while you browse.
After using BackupLoupe to sniff around your Time Machine backups and find what’s hogging up all the space, you can drag those files or folders to the System Preferences pane for exclusion. Don’t forget that you can also reclaim previously used space by permanently deleting previous versions of those files and folders while browsing in Time Machine.
BackupLoupe costs €1 (or about $1.40), and a free demo is available from soma-zone’s site.
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BackupLoupe is an alternative GUI for Time Machine. At its core it provides a Finder-like interface where you get to select a snapshot and it will show you what has been backed up.
BackupLoupe shows you which files take up the most space in an instant. Scanned snapshots are color-coded so you can tell the big ones from the small. Select a snapshot and the browser view will list all items that have been backed up ordered by size in descending order.
Even if Time Machine fails to recognize an old backup or is incapable of restoring a particular item chances are that BackupLoupe can recover your data.
Restoring files and folders with BackupLoupe couldn't be easier. Select Restore… from the context menu or drag the item to a Finder window. When restoring a directory you can choose between full restore (the directory and its contents the way it was when it had been backed up) or a partial restore (only items backed up in this particular snapshot will be restored).
BackupLoupe lets you peek inside backups, tells you which files have been backed up when and where. It will show you when a file has been backed up for the first time, when a modified version has been backed up and when it has been deleted. Navigating between versions only takes a click.
BackupLoupe provides a fast search facility. Just enter (a part) of the file name you are looking for and BackupLoupe will return a list of matching items immediately. You can search by name, path, size and file type. Use QuickLook to peek inside found files and restore them directly from the Find window.
BackupLoupe hooks into the Finder's context menu. Select 'Show Time Machine Revisions' to find out about the selected file's backup history. Preview any modification captured and restore it if you want.
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BackupLoupe 3 handles multiple hosts and backup devices. Use the built-in Disk Manager to see where backups are located and which time period they cover. You can mount and unmount backup filesystems from here as well.
Well, not quite. But based on the information BackupLoupe has collected from your backups it can tell you how much data has been backed up per hour/day/week. And knowing how much space is left on you backup device BackupLoupe can make an educated guess about when your backup device will fill up.
BackupLoupe supports all macOS versions from High Sierra (10.13) to Big Sur (11.0). It requires a 64bit Intel or Apple Silicon Mac. Both architectures are supported natively.