So for the most part, you really don’t need to manage this system yourself in any way, though there are also Terminal commands for deleting snapshots and so on (type man tmutil in Terminal for more info). (So the first snapshot there was taken at 13 seconds past 10:21 in the morning on May 16.) If you’ve read the first support article I linked above, you’ll know that Time Machine saves snapshots every hour, and it automatically cleans out items every 24 hours. That last part of each item is the date followed by the time in hours, minutes, and seconds. You can also list your existing local snapshots with this command: tmutil listlocalsnapshots /įor example, here are the ones my Mac had done recently: So just be sure you know what you’re doing!Īnyway, though, you can also use Terminal to manage these snapshots, at least a little bit if you want to create one immediately, the command is tmutil localsnapshot, like so:Īfter you press Return, your Mac will confirm what you’ve done: Once that’s done, you’ll see a list of the snapshots you can use to roll back your system!Ĭhoosing one will of course reveal another warning about how this’ll revert changes to your disk:

Obviously, you’ll only have your internal drive to pick if you don’t have a backup disk available.Īfter that, you’ll need to enter an administrator password to confirm your choice if you’ve enabled FileVault encryption. …but on the next screen, you can select a source to restore from. So select “Restore From Time Machine Backup” on that first screen as I’ve done, and then click “Continue.” You’ll get a screen informing (and warning!) you of what you’re about to do… Here’s where you’ll forgive me for the crappy Recovery pictures, right? Right. When the machine finishes starting up, you should be within macOS Recovery, which’ll give you a number of options for helping out a misbehaving Mac: Right after you do so, hold down Command-R on your keyboard until you see the Apple logo appear. To get started with that, shut down your Mac, and then press the power button to turn it back on. If what you need is just a file or two, then you’ll simply restore from Time Machine the way you normally would if you find, though, that you need to roll back your entire system, you can do it through macOS Recovery. If you need to recover stuff from one of these snapshots, though, the way you’ll go about it depends on what you’re trying to do. As you can read in that article, High Sierra will also create a snapshot automatically before doing operating system updates. As Apple notes on its support pages, Time Machine now keeps what are called local snapshots on the startup disk for your Mac, meaning that you can restore data even when you don’t have your backup drive handy.

Restore macbook pro from time machine