My first experience with Apple Time Machine is trying to understand what it is supposed to do and what it is doing. Here are some references that I found helpful. The program “tmutil” is part of MacOS. It is command line tool that can tell you a lot about time machine configuration and behavior. Being a command line tool requires some study of the man page. The “tmedit” program is provided by Time Machine Editor . It has a small GUI and provides command line features.

Electric Light Company provides a program called T2M2. This program provides a GUI interface and analyzes the Time Machine log files. The Electric Light Company site has an extensive series of pages about Time Machine. This page on Electric LIght Company identifies tools that may help with or replace Time Machine.