Friday, November 16, 2007

Tweaking MacOSX Time Machine

I installed Leopard a couple of weeks ago and have been very pleased.  It finally fixed the problem I have been having with iSync.  That alone was worth the price of admission.

I wanted to dump Retrospect which i have been using happily for years and try out Time Machine.  My backup drive wasn't really big enough for Time Machine tho, so  I ordered a 750 GB drive from EagleBit and when it arrived I fired up Time Machine.

All I can say about Time Machine is wow.  Just amazing.  How could you make the dull task of backups any cooler than that?

My only gripe is that there is no interface for setting how often the time machine backups are initiated.  You are just stuck with Apple's setting of one hour.

In my Retrospect settings I just did one back up per day and recycled every 2 weeks.

When the Time Machine is running my computer is noticeably slower and noisier.

But I found a great solution on MacOSXhints:

Just edit 
System » Library » LaunchDaemons » com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

Just change the value of StartInterval from the default value of 3600 (seconds) to the value of your choice.  Mine is now 14400 so for me Time Machine runs every four hours.

If you open the Time Machine preference pane you still that it says "hourly backups" for the past 24 hours.  But if you look at the time of the next back up you'll see that it is four hours later than your last one.  Requires a restart I think.

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