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.
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.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-04-2008 @ 11:21PM
Luigi193 said...
Side effects include...
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2-05-2008 @ 1:29AM
Evan said...
Runny Nose, Nausea and Short Term Memory Loss...
2-05-2008 @ 1:45AM
Gothgod said...
This is completely unnecessary since timeMachine only backs things up if they have changed.
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2-05-2008 @ 8:41AM
chriswaco said...
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.
2-05-2008 @ 8:57AM
P Stuart said...
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.
2-05-2008 @ 2:34AM
paul said...
I'm waiting for the add-on that allows you to control how much space can be used for it on your drive.
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2-05-2008 @ 6:11AM
DrWho said...
Point.Less
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2-05-2008 @ 8:52AM
jason said...
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
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2-05-2008 @ 10:09AM
DrWho said...
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
2-05-2008 @ 10:09AM
threepio said...
Can't reset to previous settings, eh? Hm. If only we had a backup copy of the old settings....
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2-05-2008 @ 10:13AM
Paik4Life said...
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.
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2-05-2008 @ 3:39PM
jason said...
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...
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2-12-2008 @ 1:53PM
Xof said...
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?
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