One of the advantages of APFS partitions is that you can create full snapshots in a few seconds. With this system we can create a full backup of our files and information really very quickly. Let’s talk about it all.
Copies at any time and of all content
The snapshots of our Mac, as long as we are running it from an APFS partition, are an excellent resource to keep a backup copy of our information. There is, however, an important detail to take into account: its purgable nature.
Given the size of such a snapshot, the system considers these copies to be purgeable. This means that If at any time the Mac runs out of available space, it will delete these copies. This is not by far an impediment to its use, since all we have to do is move the copy to an external storage, for example, and voila, but it is something to take into account.
Creating a backup with this system is really easy. Simply we will open the terminal and write “tmutil localsnapshot”, without the quotes. After pressing enter we will be informed that the copy has already been created, just like that.
Access the created copies this is also very simple. We do so:
- We open Spotlight by pressing Command (⌘) + Spacebar or by clicking on the small magnifying glass at the top right.
- We seek Disk utility.
- We press Enter.
- On the menu Display we activate Show APFS snapshots.
- We select, in the left sidebar, the unit from which we want to see the snapshots.
Once we get here we will see that, at the bottom of the Disk Utility window, appears a list of all snapshots. For each of them we have several options.
First, let’s look at the fact that the system collects the creation date as well as its size, in this case 31 GB. Once the snapshot we are interested in is selected, we can use the “-” symbol at the bottom of the list to delete it. We can also touch the button in the form of three dots to rename it, mount or display it in the Finder.
It is precisely this last option that we will use to navigate through the content of the copy. The snapshot maintains the content of the disk as it was at the time it was made, so if after taking it we have, for example, deleted a file, we will see that it is still in the snapshot. This allows us drag it back to the desktop, for example, to retrieve it.
These snapshots they even allow us a complete restoration of the Mac using the recovery partition. From there, after selecting Restore from a Time Machine copy, we can choose one of the snapshots and then that of a specific date to start the restoration.
True, it may be easier to use Time Machine, which in fact also saves local snapshots on our Mac, but being able to create a screenshot of the Mac at a certain time can be very interesting. One more way to make sure that if something happens, we can go back.