Terminal 101: Control Time Machine from the Command Line

Every Monday, we'll show you how to do something new and simple with Apple's built-in command line application. You don't need any fancy software, or a knowledge of coding to do any of these. All you need is a keyboard to type 'em out!

Time Machine is Apple’s answer to backup. It’s simple, it’s elegant, and it just works. However, you can still use the backup utility built into your Mac through the command line and over SSH. Very handy for those times when you may not have physical (or screen sharing) access to your Mac remotely.

In this week’s tip, we’ll show you some of the basics of backing up your Mac using Time Machine through the Terminal and using the tmutil program.

It should be noted that in order to use the tmutil program, you must be running Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later.

Enabling / Disabling Time Machine

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