macOS Mojave local snapshots

I just upgraded my Mac to Mojave and can no longer see any backup volume mounted even though Time Machine is enabled, my disk has enough space, and therefore should be used to store local backups..

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Displays:

/com.apple.TimeMachine.2018-12-04-104303

So there are snapshots available but I cannot see the internal content of it through the terminal as I use to by typing ls /volumes/Mobilebackups

Mojave stores Time Machine snapshots as APFS snapshots.

You can list these snapshots using tmutil:

% tmutil listLocalSnapshots /
[…]
com.apple.TimeMachine.2018-12-04-123456

These snapshots are not exposed anywhere in the filesystem by default, but they can be mounted manually using mount_apfs:

% sudo mkdir /Volumes/snap
% sudo mount_apfs -o ro -s com.apple.TimeMachine.2018-12-04-123456 / /Volumes/snap

Make sure to unmount the snapshot when you are done with it:

% sudo umount -f /Volumes/snap