Time Machine changes in Mavericks

Following on from my previous post on cheeky changes to OS X Mavericks, (Or 10.9), today I wanted to point out some subtle changes to the way Time Machine backs up.
First of all, the Time Machine menu bar icon no longer rotates whilst performing a back up. This was handy as a visual way of knowing that Time Machine was in the process of backing you up, but in Mavericks, Apple want to hide things even more from the Graphical Interface so users don’t have too many distractions.
If you need to know that a backup is being performed, the menu bar icon does very subtly change to have an extra Arrow in the clock face. The first image below is when NO backup is in progress. The second image is during a backup, can you see the slight icon change?!


As you can see, by clicking on the Time Machine menu bar icon it will inform you of the current state of any backups.
You can always at any time open Time Machine preferences and stare at your backup progress should you wish!

If you back up to a locally mounted drive, the Finder Sidebar icon for your connected drive will still animate rotating the Time Machine clock face.
So, not too much of a hardship to lose the rotating icon, as long as it’s backing me up then I’m happy!
The second thing I have noticed that has changed since upgrading to Mavericks is that as I backup to a Time Capsule drive over the network, the Time Capsule Drive does not ‘Mount’ on the Desktop nor show up in the Finder Sidebar as before during a backup.
So I literally have to rely on the very discrete extra Arrow in the Time Machine menu bar icon or open Time Machine Preferences.
Yes, I have checked that my Finder Preferences has the check-boxes checked as shown below, it seems this is yet another cheeky change in Mavericks to hide things from us!

For you techies out there that are as curious as me!
If you select ‘Go’ in the Finder’s menu bar and select ‘Go to Folder…’, then enter ‘/Volumes/’ in the pop up window that appears, this should display graphically all mounted volumes including your Time Machine backup drive:

As you can see, the ‘Data’ volume displayed is my Time Capsule network drive and the ‘Time Machine Backups’ volume displayed contains my backups.
I can navigate into this to see my backups.
As my Mac is an Apple portable, (for me a MacBook Pro), I also have the ‘MobileBackups’ volume which is the special location that Time Machine creates your ‘Local Snapshots’.
(You can obviously use the Terminal instead of the ‘Go to Folder…’ Finder option and navigate your file system if you are more of a command line guy!)
For more information on Time Machine you can read all our Time Machine blogs here or listen to our Time Machine Podcast series online here.

Disclaimer:
While the author has taken care to provide our readers with accurate information, please use your discretion before acting upon information based on the blog post. Amsys will not compensate you in any way whatsoever if you ever happen to suffer a loss/inconvenience/damage because of/while making use of information in this blog.
This feature has been tested using OS X v10.9.1, which was the latest Mac OS release at the time of writing.