Change the Time Machine Backup Schedule

Every Mac owner should be using Time Machine, it’s by far the easiest and most painless backup solution, running in the background and allowing for easy recovery of files or the entire operating system should something go wrong during an OS X update or otherwise. That said, Time Machine is a bit aggressive, and backs up all changes every hour that a drive is connected or within range, this is great for backup purposes but can be a nuisance when it hogs disk I/O and CPU cycles from other tasks. The easiest way to avoid this is to adjust the backup schedule, and we’ll show you how to do this from the Terminal, or with a super easy to use Preference Pane called TimeMachineScheduler.

Manually Changing Time Machine Backup Schedule
Using the command line and defaults write, you can manually adjust the Time Machine backup schedule. This command belongs on a single line:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 14400

The last number is the time interval in seconds, making hours grouped by 3600 second segments. If you wanted to wait 4 hours between backups, the number would be 14400, and so on. The default setting is one hour, or 3600 seconds, which can be restored with:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 3600

If you don’t like the command line, or if you want more control over when Time Machine runs, your best bet is the free TimeMachineScheduler app for Mac OS X.


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