I know i can get the time stamp of the latest Time Machine backup with the command tmutil latestbackup | grep -E -o "[0-9\-]+$" but this only works when my backup disk is plugged in. If not, i get the error message Unable to locate machine directory for host.
Is there any other way to figure out (through scripting) when the last backup was made?
I'm running OS X Mavericks and the use case would be to eventually run this as remote monitoring for Macs, say, using collectd.
Best Answer
Parse the XML you get from settings - defaults read on the command line:
That is a crude way to parse the xml / plist so you could use python or swift to properly read the preference plist / xml and parse out things like the last local snapshot date, last consistency check date, etc...