BackupThe health dashboard and menu-bar health indicator are a v1.x feature — already running in development, arriving after the v1.0 launch.
The menu bar icon tells the truth
- Clock with checkmark — on schedule, all verified.
- Sync arrows + percentage — a backup is running now.
- Orange exclamation clock — attention: no verified backup in over 24 hours, or a backup has failed.
- Red exclamation clock — serious: over 48 hours without a verified backup, or 3+ consecutive failures.
You never have to open anything to know your backups quietly stopped — the icon changes color the moment they do.
The Health dashboard
Click the pulse icon in the menu for the full picture: last verified backup, backup-disk capacity (with a warning bar past 90%), startup-disk free space, how many backups you have and how far back they reach, and a chart of recent backup durations with failures marked in red. All of it reads from Time Machine's own records — no special permissions. See it in action on the home page.
Pre-flight checks
Before every backup, BackupTempo verifies the two conditions that cause the most cryptic Time Machine failures: startup-disk free space (Time Machine needs ~10 GB of staging room and fails confusingly without it) and the backup disk being mounted. If a check fails, you get the plain-language reason immediately — on the first attempt, not days later.
Notifications — only when something's wrong
BackupTempo never notifies on success. You'll hear about: a backup that failed (with automatic retries that back off: 15 min → 30 → 1 h → 2 h → 4 h), repeated failures (escalated wording at 3 in a row), no verified backup in 2+ days, the backup disk over 90% full, and the startup disk running low. Each warning fires at most once per day.