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Restoring from CloudMachine

Nothing special: this is a normal Time Machine backup. Enter Time Machine from the menu bar to browse versions, or restore a whole system through Migration Assistant. That is the reason for the disk-image approach — file-level cloud backup tools cannot feed Migration Assistant.

What is actually in there

CloudMachine decides where the backup goes; Time Machine decides what goes into it, and it will happily report a healthy 210 GiB backup that omits your home directory. Check before you need it:

tmutil isexcluded ~/Documents ~/Desktop ~/Pictures
plutil -p /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist | grep -A15 SkipPaths

SkipPaths is the exclusion list from System Settings → Time Machine → Options. ~/.cloudmachine belongs there — it is the write buffer, and backing it up would mean backing up the backup. Anything else on that list is a deliberate decision worth re-reading.

Actually pulling a file back out

A backup nobody has ever restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup. This takes a minute and touches nothing:

B=$(tmutil listbackups -m | tail -1)   # -m mounts the snapshot; without it the path 404s
ls "$B"                                 # -> Data
cp "$B/Data/private/etc/hosts" /tmp/    # a single file
cp -R "$B/Data/private/etc/pam.d" /tmp/ # a whole directory
shasum -a 256 /tmp/hosts /etc/hosts     # the two lines must match

Then unmount what you browsed, because a mounted snapshot holds the image device busy and makes detach-image fail:

mount | grep /Volumes/.timemachine/ |
  sed -E 's/^.* on (\/Volumes\/\.timemachine\/[^(]*) \(.*$/\1/' |
  while read -r m; do diskutil unmount "$m"; done

Use diskutil unmount, not umount — the latter returns Operation not permitted for these snapshots.

Checking the image

cloudmachine-agent verify-image

hdiutil verify does not work on a sparsebundle: such an image carries no checksum and the tool reports has no checksum. The right tool is fsck_apfs on the attached device, which is what verify-image runs.

verify-image is not a background task. fsck_apfs reads the image's metadata through the rclone mount, snapshot by snapshot, so its runtime tracks the snapshot count rather than the data size — 39 snapshots over a 589 GiB image (29 Sep 2026) is hours, not minutes, and the count climbs hourly. Running it against the attached image saturates the mount badly enough that mount(8) itself blocks and backupd cannot mount the destination, so the hourly backups fail while it runs. Detach first, as the command requires, and do it when you can leave the Mac alone.