DeltaSnap - APFS Snapshot Manager for macOS | ScaleNinja

DeltaSnap Free 30-day trial

The APFS snapshot manager macOS never shipped

Your Mac already takes APFS snapshots and leaves you tmutil and a Disk Utility menu to manage them. DeltaSnap is the missing layer: list, label, tag, hold, mount, diff, and restore snapshots on every APFS volume, with a searchable index of every file they hold and retention you set, from a native app or a ZFS-style dsnap CLI.

• Snapshot in milliseconds.
• Label, tag, hold, mount, destroy.
• Diff two points, restore one file.

• Developers
• Sysadmins
• Power Users
• Server Macs and Homelabs

Free 30-day trial · Secured by Polar · Signed & Notarised · macOS 15+ · Designed for single-user Macs

Pricing and Licensing · Changelog · EULA

$ brew tap scaleninja/tap && brew trust --tap scaleninja/tap$ brew install --cask deltasnap

Already have Time Machine?

Why run a snapshot manager when you already have backups?

Because macOS already takes APFS snapshots and does almost nothing with them. Time Machine writes one roughly every hour and discards it after about a day. You cannot label it, diff it, or decide to keep it. DeltaSnap manages those snapshots and its own, on every APFS volume you track, with retention you set, a diff between any two points, and single-file restore.

It is not a backup. Snapshots share the volume, so they die with the disk. Keep Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, or Arq for hardware loss and theft, and use DeltaSnap for the mistakes that happen far more often.

What macOS leaves out

Apple built the snapshots. Nobody built the manager.

Every APFS Mac is already carrying snapshots: the hourly ones Time Machine leaves behind, and the ones cloning and backup tools take before they copy. macOS offers tmutil and a Disk Utility menu to look at them. DeltaSnap gives you one window for every snapshot on every tracked volume, a signed helper that mounts and restores from them, and a CLI that scripts the lot.

Why it is this fast

Checkpoints in milliseconds. Restores at local disk speed.

Speed here is not an optimisation, it is the storage model. An APFS snapshot is copy-on-write metadata, so taking one copies nothing. It records the state of the filesystem and returns. Your history then lives on the same physical disk as the volume it captures, which is why getting a file back is a local copy rather than a trip to a backup destination.

Command Line Interface

A powerful, ZFS-like workflow.

For developers, system administrators, and power users who miss ZFS storage ergonomics, the bundled dsnap CLI brings snapshot controls to macOS. List volumes, create snapshots, mount them for inspection, delete them deliberately, and diff from Terminal.

• Safety checkpoints for scripts. Wrap an installer, migration, or agent run in dsnap snapshot --safety so the checkpoint expires on its own, then attach searchable text or JSON metadata with dsnap tag.

• Relative snapshot references. Use HEAD for the newest snapshot and HEAD~1 for the previous one when comparing or mounting from scripts.

• Automation-friendly. Use the CLI for repeatable list, APFS volume creation, snapshot, tag, mount, unmount, hold, unhold, destroy, schedule, index, license-status, and diff flows.

dsnap — zsh

$ dsnap list -t container
NAME    USED    AVAIL   REFER   MOUNT                  DEV                       ID
disk3   182.4G  311.2G  182.4G  -                      Contains data             -

$ dsnap create -o mountpoint=/Users/rohit/Documents disk3/Documents
Created APFS volume "Documents" (disk3s6) on disk3.
Persisted mount at /Users/rohit/Documents via /etc/fstab.

$ dsnap list
NAME        USED    AVAIL   REFER   MOUNT                   DEV           ID
data        152.4G  311.2G  152.4G  /System/Volumes/Data    /dev/disk3s5  6C2FB...
documents   30.0G   311.2G  30.0G   /Users/rohit/Documents  /dev/disk3s6  D42CD...

$ PRE=$(dsnap snapshot --safety documents@pre-upgrade)

$ dsnap tag "$PRE" '{"task":"os-upgrade","phase":"pre"}'
tagged documents@com.scaleninja.DeltaSnap.safety.2026-07-27T06-05-10Z.pre-upgrade

$ POST=$(dsnap snapshot --safety documents@post-upgrade)
$ dsnap diff "$PRE" "$POST" --format=tree
Users/
  rohit/
    Documents/
      + new-config.json
      M package.json
      DMGs/
        - old-binary.dmg

$ dsnap hold "$POST"
held documents@com.scaleninja.DeltaSnap.safety.2026-07-27T06-08-42Z.post-upgrade

Works with what you already run

Your other apps' snapshots become history you can use.

Your Mac is probably already carrying snapshots DeltaSnap did not create. Time Machine leaves local ones behind between backups; Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, and Arq each take their own before they copy. DeltaSnap treats them as ordinary history: mount them, compare them, and restore single files out of them, at no extra cost in space because they already exist.

Features

Every snapshot operation macOS left out.

Native where it matters

Every checkpoint is a standard APFS snapshot, visible to tmutil and Disk Utility and usable without DeltaSnap installed. DeltaSnap adds the searchable index, version timeline, tags, retention policy, activity and notification history, Finder surfaces, and signed helper around it. File and folder synchronization lives in DeltaSync, the free DeltaSync companion app.

Inside the app

A native Mac app, not a wrapper around a shell script.

Version history, comparisons, Finder actions, monitoring, and an audit trail for every operation the background helper performs.

In their own words

What people are saying about DeltaSnap.

Notes from customers, early users, and the Mac community.

1. 1

   Checkpoint before the run

   One safety snapshot, from the CLI or the agent skill, tagged with the task, session, and phase, and set to expire on its own.

2. 2

   See the actual blast radius

   After the edit, the skill creates a second checkpoint and runs dsnap diff to surface unexpected paths.

3. 3

   Keep the good, undo the rest

   Search by file, preview earlier versions, restore a separate copy, or replace only the damaged item instead of rolling back everything.

4. 4

   Watch for runaway change

   Mass-change monitoring can flag unusually rapid activity and take an additional safety snapshot when the configured threshold is crossed.

Open-source Agent Skill

Give your desktop or CLI agent a filesystem safety protocol.

The same portable SKILL.md works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and other skill-aware tools that can run local shell commands. It never deletes snapshots it did not create and never attempts a whole-volume rollback.

Snapshots vs backups

Why use a snapshot tool if you already have backups?

Because snapshots, local backups, and remote backups solve different recovery problems. DeltaSnap is the fast local checkpoint layer: use it before risky changes, compare what changed, and recover files in seconds. Keep external and remote backups for hardware loss, theft, and disasters.

Further reading

Go deeper on APFS snapshots.

Engineering notes and guides from the team behind DeltaSnap: how the private APFS snapshot entitlement Apple granted ScaleNinja makes the app possible, when a separate APFS volume keeps snapshot history focused, and what changes in each release.

Compare

How DeltaSnap compares.

Native snapshot tools, file-history browsers, project version-control apps, and backup systems overlap in different ways. Compare checkpoints, search, diffs, recovery, automation, and failure boundaries.