I backup my Apple Silicon Mac (running macOS Sonoma) to an external, directly attached drive via Time Machine.
All backup snapshots on that external drive I can list via
$ ls -1 /Volumes/.timemachine/<GUID>/
(<GUID> is here a long hexadecimal number identifier.) In this directory are all the snapshots, for example
/Volumes/.timemachine/<GUID>/2024-03-14-123547.backup
However inside the snapshot folder is no accessible Data directory. So I think I need to mount the snapshot before I can access its data in the Terminal.
So I tried
$ mkdir ~/TM_Backup
$ mount_apfs -s com.apple.TimeMachine.2024-03-14-123547 / ~/TM_Backup
But I always get the error message “mount_apfs: volume could not be mounted: Resource busy” (I get this error with _all snapshots, so there must be something wrong with the command.)
How can I mount the TimeMachine Backup snapshot via a Terminal command?