Image via Wikipedia
Those of you that have upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard have probably discovered Time Machine. Time Machine is not without its frustrations when you are trying to set it up, but it is hands down one of the best backup systems out there for the typical user. The ability to literally reach back in time and grab a file that was accidentally deleted, or changed in an undesirable manner, is something you don’t fully appreciate until you have used it a few times. It’s really too bad that it doesn’t work as well as it should under certain circumstances (such as when saving to some types of external drives) but we suspect that Apple is working on the problems, and there are supposed to be fixes for Time Machine in the next Leopard update.
One of the frustrating things about Time Machine is it that it makes a new backup once an hour, and there is no way provided to change that timing. As you may imagine, people have various reasons for wanting to adjust that schedule, and fortunately there are two different pieces of free software that will let you do that. Pick one (and only one) and let it modify Time Machine’s behavior to your liking.
The first one we’ll talk about is TimeMachineEditor, which lets you change the default one-hour backup interval of Time Machine. According to the author’s site, you can change the interval or decide to make a backup once a day, once a week or once a month.
The site also describes how it works:
TimeMachineEditor merely updates a system configuration file to change the Time Machine scheduling.
Nothing is installed in your system and you can easily revert back to the default settings (using the ‘Show Default Settings’ menu item from the ‘Settings’ menu).
Once you have changed the scheduling, you can still use the Time Machine preference pane from “System Preferences” as you did before. However the next backup date in the Time Machine preference pane may not be correct, this is just the user interface not being aware of the new scheduling and can be ignored without risk.
The above screenshot shows that it is possible for the user to select an interval. There are more screenshots showing other modes of operation on the author’s web site, so have a look.
The other alternative is called TimeMachineScheduler, and it will let you set the backup interval of Time Machine from 1 to 12 hours.
The feature list for TimeMachineScheduler is as follows:
- Set the interval from 1 to 12 hours.
- Run the backup manually or automatically also at startup, login or when the daemon has been loaded.
- Display the status of the daemon, of the backup volume and if the backup is currently running.
- Automount, an option to mount and unmount the backup volume automatically (see known problems).
- Option to hide the backup volume (to take effect a Finder relaunch is required).
You can visit the TimeMachineScheduler web site for more information. Sooner or later we expect Apple to include this functionality in Time Machine itself, eliminating the need for add-ons such as these. Until they do, you can use either of these programs to get Time Machine to backup on your schedule.
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