MACOS
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> Check integrity of backups
How can I check that Time Machine backups of my documents aren’t corrupt or damaged?
In Sonoma there doesn’ t appear to be any direct way to check the integrity of files in a backup, although you should periodically confirm you can restore items from your backups as a routine.
In previous versions of macOS, Time Machine offered a consistency scan, shown by Ctrl+Shift–clicking the backup volume in its pane in System Preferences, but that has vanished from System Settings. The command tool tmutil also offers an option to verify checksums. Although running that seems to do something, it doesn’ t take much time and delivers no result either, so can’t be trusted.
Apple does describe another feature available from the Time Machine menu: open with Opt held and you’ll see Back Up Now changes to offer to Verify Backups. This seems intended for use with backups on network storage such as NAS, and when used for local backups all it appears to do is make another manual backup, which its log entries refer to as a “manual health check”, but it too doesn’ t report anything as a result.