Skip to content
man
tmutil - time machine utility

tmutil - time machine utility

see also:

remove time machine exclusion 

tmutil removeexclusion /path/to/directory # or file

bulk remove time machine exclusions

example: for some reason, I had a long list of files excluded which were stored in my iCloud Drive, and I didn’t know why. the files contained spaces as well and need to be treated differently.

  1. find all files which are excluded by time machine, I’m filtering the files which are stored in iCloud Drive (apple’s great name for this folder is com~apple~CloudDocs)
  2. change the IFS variable to not treat spaces as an input separator, but rather newlines
  3. iterate through the files (check the output file before doing this) and remove the time machine exclusion entry for entry
sudo mdfind "com_apple_backup_excludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"|rg "com~apple~CloudDocs" > $TMPDIR/exclude.txt
IFS=$'\n'
for i in $(cat $TMPDIR/exclude.txt); do tmutil removeexclusion "$i";done
terminaltmux