TimeMachineEditor 1.2

If you have been putting off using Time Machine to back up your Mac because of the lack of being able to time backups; you have no excuse now. As many of you already know, Time Machine does a complete system backup at first, then hourly backups of system changes. It does this until your Time Machine disk is completely full, then it erases the oldest backups and carries on.

TimeMachineEditor allows you to change the times that TimeMachine backs your system up. You can change it to once a day, week, or month; and control the times it backs up at. On the developers website, they mention that this program doesn't run in place of TimeMachine, rather, it just changes the interval that the system backs up. TimeMachineEditor is available as freeware from the developer's website or from MacUpdate.

As a word of caution, use this at your own risk, as the developer doesn't provide a way to reset the original settings of Time Machine. They also mention that the "Latest backup" time may be incorrect in the Time Machine System Preference pane.

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If you have been putting off using Time Machine to back up your Mac because of the lack of being able to time backups; you have no excuse...

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Xof711

10.5.2 resets Time Machine interval backups back to 1/H tho I changed the .plist file to every 4H, it's now back to 1H :(

Can't seem to find where the new .plist is now... Anyone?

February 12 2008 at 1:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jason

Wrong again DrWho. I dont want all the files in that dir not to be backed up. Just ones that I am working at the time that are large. And for some recording and rendering apps you dont get to choose what file location it is.

Try again...

February 05 2008 at 3:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Paik4Life

Definitely not pointless. I've been wanting something like this for a while now. It's great for people who don't have huge HDDs that they want to use solely for Time Machine. I'm only using a 320GB external drive for Time Machine.

If anything, I'd say hourly backups are more "pointless" for the average user. It's a bonus that you can tell it to back up when you typically won't be using your computer so that it doesn't eat up resources in the middle of important work.

February 05 2008 at 10:12 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

threepio

Can't reset to previous settings, eh? Hm. If only we had a backup copy of the old settings....

February 05 2008 at 10:08 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jason

Not pointless. If you don't want your TM drive to spin up every hour you can use this. Also if you work on large temp files that you know you will delete and you dont want them being backed up in the hour that you are working you can set time machine to bckup once a day or every 4 hours.

Also

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 7200

This changes Time Machine's backup interval to every 7200 seconds, the default value is 3600, so you can play around and set it to what ever you like.

Lets remember if you don't find a use for it its not useless for everyone

February 05 2008 at 8:51 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to jason's comment

You can already tell TimeMachine files or folders to exclude from the backup which is a much better way of avoiding large temp files than changing the frequency of the backup

February 05 2008 at 10:09 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Point.Less

February 05 2008 at 6:11 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

paul

I'm waiting for the add-on that allows you to control how much space can be used for it on your drive.

February 05 2008 at 2:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Gothgod

This is completely unnecessary since timeMachine only backs things up if they have changed.

February 05 2008 at 1:44 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Gothgod's comment

ChrisW

This is not unnecessary and should be built into Time Machine. Time Machine brings my machine (an 8-core) to a crawl whenever it runs. I only want to run it at night.

Too bad it doesn't support Spotlight index timing too.

February 05 2008 at 8:41 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

P Stuart

And, I thought that "Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month." So all you will save by doing daily backups are the changes you make in 1 day.

So far, I am happy with TimeMachine and SuperDuper!, which I use to create bootable disk images on a separate drive (much less often than I used to).

Word of caution to self: all these backups are in the same physical space -- fire or theft would be a disaster.

February 05 2008 at 8:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Luigi193

Side effects include...

February 04 2008 at 11:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Luigi193's comment

eSystm

Runny Nose, Nausea and Short Term Memory Loss...

February 05 2008 at 1:29 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply