BackupThe 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.
Local snapshots
Time Machine also keeps local snapshots on your Mac's own startup disk — restore points that let you recover recent versions of files even when the backup drive isn't connected. They're separate from your real backups, and macOS normally cleans them up by itself after about a day.
Click Local Snapshots… in the Health dashboard to see them. Each one is labelled honestly:
- In backups — a completed backup on your backup drive covers this restore point. Deleting it only frees space on your startup disk.
- Only on this Mac — this restore point hasn't made it into your backups yet (the drive was unavailable, or the backup didn't finish). Deleting it loses that point in time permanently — BackupTempo warns you first.
Deleting local snapshots never touches the backup drive itself.
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.