I've been using Time Machine for a while now - it's been working nicely; but I really want to know more about its day-to-day activities. How many megabytes did it back up today? How many files? Where are the hot spots? In MacOS 10.5.2 a new menu bar icon appeared, with some minimal controls and information for Time Machine - it says exactly when Time Machine is running, the size of the backup delta, time of last backup - I don't have to open Time Machine Preferences anymore.

Also, backupd (the program that does the actual backup) logs its progress in the system log, but there's a lot of information that it doesn't log, and it's not a nice way to visualize the information. There's more information logged in files on the backup drive, next to each backup - but if, like me, you back up over the network, that backup volume is not always mounted.

What I want is a nice Dashboard widget, with a list of all backups made, how much new information was backed up each time, which backups have been removed by the thinning algorythm, and maybe things like free disk space on the backup drive, time of next backup, a progress bar when a backup is running, etc.

A while ago I started working on just such a widget, and a Python script to parse log files, but I never got around to finishing it. If anyone wants to collaborate on that, please let me know :)