Take an instant local snapshot before a risky change — via SS64

Commandlow riskmacOS 14 Sonoma and later

Before installing something sketchy or making a big change, tmutil can take a local APFS snapshot of the volumes included in your Time Machine backup in seconds, giving you a restore point to fall back on.

Takes effect right away

The easy way

  1. Run the command. It snapshots every APFS volume included in your Time Machine backup.
  2. List snapshots with tmutil listlocalsnapshots /.
  3. Remove snapshots for a volume with tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / if you need the space back.

Command

Run in Terminal (Applications › Utilities).

tmutil localsnapshot
Needs Time Machine to be set up. Local snapshots live on the same disk, so they don't replace a real backup on another drive.

Sources

Source reviewed
2026-11-02
Link checked
2026-11-02
Tested hands-on
Not by Oddbyte.Me

Oddbyte.Me hasn't tried this on every macOS version, so keep the undo handy.

time machinesnapshotapfstmutilrestorebackup

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