swift-icloud-backup

A macOS terminal app that copies your iCloud Documents onto a connected storage device, plus some helper tools

Usage

icloudbackup

Copy files from your iCloud Documents directory to another destination.

# Show help
./icloudbackup --help

# Show auto-detected documents directory
./icloudbackup --show-src

# Analyze source and destination trees and print what would happen
./icloudbackup --dry-run --dst "/Volumes/Black/icloud-documents-backup/"

# Analyze source and destination trees and print what would happen with all individual files
./icloudbackup --dry-run --dst "/Volumes/Black/icloud-documents-backup/" --verbose

# Perform backup
./icloudbackup --dst "/Volumes/Black/icloud-documents-backup/"

# Backup another directory
./icloudbackup --src "/Users/guenther/Downloads/" --dst "/Volumes/Black/icloud-documents-backup/"

icloudstats

Show stats about your iCloud Documents directory

# Show help
./icloudstats --help

# Show auto-detected documents directory
./icloudstats --show-src

# Scan and show stats
./icloudstats

# Scan and show stats of another directory
./icloudstats --src "/Users/guenther/Downloads/"

iclouddownload

Recursively download a directory below the iCloud Documents directory.

# Show help
./iclouddownload --help

# Download everything below that base directory
./iclouddownload --base "/Users/guenther/Documents/books"

# Download everything below that base directory, showing individual files
./iclouddownload --base "/Users/guenther/Documents/books" --verbose

icloudoffload

Recursively remove the local copies of a directory below the iCloud Documents directory.

# Show help
./icloudoffload --help

# Offload everything below that base directory
./icloudoffload --base "/Users/guenther/Documents/books"

# Offload everything below that base directory, showing individual files
./icloudoffload --base "/Users/guenther/Documents/books" --verbose

Screenshots

TODO: These are old.

Dependencies

• swift-argument-parser (flags and options)
• chalk (colors)

Why?

• Offloaded files only exist as a placeholder *.plist files on your drive
• These files only have a few bytes
• Because of this common filesystem usage tools like DaisyDisk are of no use to identify big files or get an overview about your actual storage usage
  • You need to analyze the content of the *.plist placeholder file along with real files
• Because of this common backup tools like rsync are of no use, would just copy the placeholder
  • You need to download, backup and offload the real file
• These tools help with those issues

Know Issues

• Limitation: Using a non-APFS formatted drive as destination is not supported
  • Copying works fine, but afterwards the file attributes can't be set correctly for e.g. exFAT (probably because those attributes don't exist there?)
  • HFS+ might work, untested
• Limitation: Colorized output does not work in XCode's console
  • Colors are apparently not supported
  • Build and use in a real terminal
• Improvement: Progress indication is not yet shown during long running operations
  • Use https://github.com/jkandzi/Progress.swift
  • Progress will not be shown correctly in XCode's console as well, cursor movements are apparently not supported, no problems in a real terminal