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July 2, 2008

tips

Tell Time Machine to slow it down now

Posted Jul. 2, ’08, 4:29 PM PT by Dan Pourhadi
Category | Tips

timeMachineHourly1.jpgLike Derik, I, too, get frustrated by the selfish demands of Time Machine and its stubborn adherence to an unchangeable, regimented backup schedule. And it’s particularly maddening for me: I have a MacBook Air, which is bottlenecked by its puny hard drive as it is; plus, I use Time Machine over WiFi to a disk connected to my AirPort Extreme (a la Time Capsule), which clobbers my network every time it runs a backup.

And like Derik, I often opt to just brick-wall the backup by canceling it so it won’t interfere with whatever I’m working on at the time. But that should be an unnecessary inconvenience—this is an obvious-enough problem, so why isn’t there an effective one-time solution?

Well, there is, kinda: just extend the length of the interval between backups, so it isn’t bothering you nearly as much. But, as described by Mac OS X Hints, doing that is not as simple as clicking a checkbox. You need to tweak a Time Machine preference file (plist) manually.

In /System/Library/LaunchDaemons, you’ll see a file named com.apple.backupd-auto.plist. Open it in a text editor, and look for this:

<key>StartInterval</key>

<integer>3600</integer>

3600 represents the number of seconds between Time Machine backups; change it to whatever length you think will annoy you less. Save, and you’re done, free to go about your business without the constant threat of Time Machine brutality.


3 Comments

iGO Author Profile Page said:

Or you can simply use this very free application.

http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/

Works like a charm !!

July 2, 2008 9:57 PM
iPim said:

I use the same application as iGO. No file manipulation to do; just click, select and done.
http://ipim.delrue.com/2008/06/freeware-timemachine-editor-13.html (dutch)

July 3, 2008 5:20 AM
lipbalm said:

From the TimeMachineEditor page:

How does it work?
TimeMachineEditor merely updates a system configuration file to change the Time Machine scheduling.

Why not just save some time and (a small amount of) disk space and just edit the file as described?

Great tip Dan! I just set mine to every three hours so I don't have to listen to my FireWire drive spin up as often. I recommend making a back up of the file, just in case. I made a backup like this (from the Terminal):

sudo cp /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist \
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist.orig

July 3, 2008 10:37 AM

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