I have an external SSD that is attached to my MacBook Air whenever I’m at my desk (since the tiny 120GB internal drive cannot be upgraded).
I recently discovered that the external drive had become corrupted, so I purchased a new one, and was able to to migrate most files successfully from the old drive to the new drive using rsync. In the process, I found that a number of files had “vanished”, and I was able to rescue these from my backup.
My concern now is that maybe other files have gone missing, and I would like to compare the contents of the drive with some previous Time Machine monthly snapshots, to get a list of files that are in the snapshot but not in the current drive. Then I can work out if they were files I had actually intended to delete, or if they just got lost and need to be restored.
I could purchase another SSD, copy the whole Time Machine snapshot to that, and then use “rsync -ni –ignore-existing” to generate the file list comparing the two SSDs.
But is there a better way, where I can just generate this information directly from interacting with the Time Machine snapshot?
My first thought was to try rsync but I didn’t expect it would work with a Time Machine backup, and after a long wait nothing was happening. I know tmutil can compare the most recent snapshot with the current state – but can it do that for a specified previous snapshot, and for a specific volume only? Or is there some other way?
Thank you!
(I am on a 2018 MacBook Air running Sonoma 14.6.1 – my Time Machine backup is on a 4th generation Time Capsule, usually connected wirelessly but currently connected wired)