I’ve been meaning to post on the TimemachineEditor for Mac app for a while now, as it is just a complete little gem of an app. A question on Quora this morning was my reminder to do this post – as a user was asking how you change the backup schedule in the Mac’s Time […]
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Tired of Hourly Time Machine Backups & Want to Set a Backup Schedule? There’s an App for That

Feb 28th 2011 by

TimeMachineEditor

I’ve been meaning to post on the TimemachineEditor for Mac app for a while now, as it is just a complete little gem of an app. A question on Quora this morning was my reminder to do this post – as a user was asking how you change the backup schedule in the Mac’s Time Machine backup program.

And of course, sadly, the answer is that you cannot alter the schedule of Time Machine’s backup. You’re stuck with hourly backups all day long, like it or not, and the potential performance hit that comes with those.

Luckily, TimeMachineEditor is a nifty and free solution for the lack of scheduling ability in Time Machine.

Here’s its brief description at the app’s website:

TimeMachineEditor is a software for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that lets you change the default one-hour backup interval of Time Machine.

You can change the interval or create a more sophisticated scheduling (see screenshot below).

This is useful if you don’t need to backup every hour and don’t want the performance penalty. This is also especially useful if you manipulate lots of data within one hour as you would spend the whole day backing up.

And herea are a couple of other points worth noting about the app:

TimeMachineEditor does not modify existing system files at all (unlike versions prior to 2.5). Instead it handles its own scheduling to trigger Time Machine backups when you want them to occur.

Good stuff.

You need to turn automatic backups in Time Machine off when using TimeMachineEditor – as you’ll now be using the schedule you set for backups.

I’ve been using this app for ages – as I could not stand the system performance hit that came along with hourly backups. I set it to backup each night at 9:30PM – as most days I’m not expecting to be doing a lot of work by that time of night.

The app works like a charm, and is simple to use. Oh, and it’s also free. Like a said above, a clever little gem of an app.

For more detail, or to download TimeMachineEditor, go here:

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

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