Time Machine and backing up

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downingp

macrumors 6502a

Original poster

• Jan 27, 2008

• #1

Is it bad to have an external drive power up, back up, and power down every hour? Will it decrease the life of the hard drive? I have a western digital 1TB My Book.
I feel backing up every hour isn't really necessary in my situation; maybe daily or weekly would be better. If, however, it doesn't hurt the drive to power up and power down every hour, I guess it doesn't hurt to back up that often.

What do you guys think? Thanks.

 

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Chris204

macrumors regular

• Jan 27, 2008

• #2

I'm kind of wondering the same thing. I don't need an hourly backup... maybe once a day. Can this be done?

 

netnothing

macrumors 68040

• Jan 27, 2008

• #3

I've always been under the assumption that leaving computer equipment ON puts less wear and tear than power on/off constantly.

Personally, I'd just leave it on and running all the time.....drives are built for that.

As for the scheduler, I know there is this program:
http://www.klieme.com/TimeMachineScheduler.html

I have not used it, and don't know anyone who has, so I'd try/use at your own risk.

-Kevin

 

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downingp

macrumors 6502a

Original poster

• Jan 27, 2008

• #4

It seems like the My Books by Western Digital have a built in mechanism to turn off after being idle for a certain time. Is there a way to turn that off so the drive is always on?

 

DJAKO

macrumors 6502a

• Jan 27, 2008

• #5

Taken from another thread...

I don't like that solution, when there's a perfectly reasonable solution in the command line (as you say):

Code:

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

This is the default value (of 1 hour), and so 3600 should be replaced with whatever # in seconds you want. Hint: Google "# seconds to hours" for a nice conversion. 🙂

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