After a few kernel panics and an accidental hot-unplugging of my Firewire Time Machine drive, I'd like to make sure that my Time Machine exactly matches my Macintosh HD, much like rsync -a. Is there a way to force Time Machine to do a deep traversal to check that the backup matches?
Knowing how to do this on Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion would be useful.
Best Answer
Setting the Time Machine destination to nothing and then re-setting it to the same location as before forces a deep traversal for me. You could try rebooting between the changing of the destination and the re-adding it to increase the chance of a deep traversal being triggered.
Worst case, we could muck about in single user mode to destroy the fseventsd directory at a safe time when the system is not counting on it to be correct, so you have forced a new database that won't match. You could presumably delete this from the TM side, but I would remove the boot copy as marginally safer and less prone to destroying data you need or messing up your backup.
If you're inclined to use the command line / terminal, I'd start with
tmutil comparebefore you even thing about forcing a deep traversal. It explicitly compares things as they exist now to the last snapshot and you can force things by specifying a specific external snapshot if you are worried about a local snapshot being compared.