Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community. If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. It’s almost entirely eliminated the sounds I hear from my server, and made my workspace a better place. Or maybe you just don’t need a backup every hour, and prefer Time Machine to run every two hours, or 90 minutes, or 10 hours.Īpple hasn’t seen fit to give you those choices when you turn on Time Machine, but TimeMachineEditor gives you that level of control. TimeMachineEditor is pretty flexible, especially the Calendar Intervals feature, which will let you schedule backups exactly when you want them. Just as these two Macs are different and require different settings, your particular setup may have some very specific attributes. As for my iMac, I’ve set it to back up “when inactive”, which generally has the effect of my Time Machine backup happening when I’m eating lunch or running an errand-and otherwise not around to hear the churning of my backup disk. Instead, I’ve set it to back up late in the evening when I’m done for the day. My server’s boot drive doesn’t have a lot of important data on it, and it certainly doesn’t need to backing itself up hourly. There’s also an override to block out time when backups should never be done. It’s a very simple tool, with three modes of operation: back up when inactive, back up on a regular timed interval, or back up at various times you define. The solution I use to solve this problem is the free TimeMachineEditor by tclementdev (donation requested), which turns off Time Machine’s automatic scheduling and instead provides its own scheduling system that kicks off a normal Time Machine backup when appropriate. The result: Lots of clicking from the RAID, which is really distracting. By default, Time Machine tries to back up every hour, which leads to two backups happening in my office every hour. My server backs itself up to the RAID via Time Machine (in addition to a network backup), and my iMac Pro also backs up to the RAID via Time Machine. My RAID isn’t particularly loud, but there are still five drives in there and they do make an audible noise when they’re working. But those drives are the only classic spinning-disc hard drives left in my house at this point, and I’ve gotten accustomed to the silence of flash storage. I love the RAID array I have attached to my Mac mini server, with 16TB of data spread redundantly across five physical drives. So what’s really happened with macOS Sierra is that the ambiguity has been removed, rather than there being a new option.Reduce backup frequency with TimeMachineEditor ![]() You can find the TimeMachineEditor download on the Developer website. For example, you can set intervals, fixed times for every day or backup events on fixed days at fixed times in the week. ![]() Despite the switch now reading OFF, which implies Time Machine has been turned off (!), you could actually manually backup by clicking the option on the Time Machine menu bar icon. The free, small software TimeMachineEditor ensures that you get quick and easy access to advanced settings of the Time Machine backup. UPDATE: As is pointed out in the comments below turning off automatic backups was in fact possible with earlier releases of macOS (OS X) by simply clicking the switch in System Preferences so that it went from ON to OFF. I havent used it for a couple of years but it looks like it is still being. Notably, turning off automatic backups also turns off the local snapshot feature that temporarily backups files to the Mac’s hard disk when the Time Machine drive (or Time Capsule) isn’t available. I have used TimeMachineEditor in the past to alter the frequency of backups. You’ve always been able to do this, of course, but by turning off automatic backups it becomes the ONLY way to backup via Time Machine. Once this is activated you must click the Time Machine icon on the menu bar, and select to backup whenever you feel the need. Well, in macOS Sierra there’s now a switch in the Time Machine section of System Preferences, where automatic backups can be turned off. Hidden macOS Sierra feature: Manual Time MachineĪ frequent criticism of Time Machine since its invention has been that people don’t necessarily want it to run automatically, because it can sap resources and slow down the Mac.
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