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Time Machine Hourly Backups....

kdum8

kdum8

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
How long should the hourly backup for time machine to an external drive usually take assuming you haven't done much at all since the previous backups? Mine seem to take 15-25 minutes which seems really excessive?? Is there anyway to disable hourly backups... once a day would be sufficient I think.
 
kdum8 said:
Wow, jayhawk to the rescue again. Just ordered 4GB of RAM from Crucial due to your earlier suggestion...

It doesn't say how big the backup is going to be at all... Where does it tell you that?
Click to expand...

Haha glad I could help. I was actually laughing as I replied to this. On your menu bar, where your Wireless, Bluetooth and battery indicators are at there should be a Time Machine icon. When Time Machine is doing a backup, the icon will animate and rotate counterclockwise. If you click it, it will give you a status about time machine.

*In the picture its to the left of the volume icon...yours won't have the exclamation point (thats a warning since I haven't backed up in a couple days)
 

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jayhawk11 said:
Haha glad I could help. I was actually laughing as I replied to this. On your menu bar, where your Wireless, Bluetooth and battery indicators are at there should be a Time Machine icon. When Time Machine is doing a backup, the icon will animate and rotate counterclockwise. If you click it, it will give you a status about time machine.

*In the picture its to the left of the volume icon...yours won't have the exclamation point (thats a warning since I haven't backed up in a couple days)
Click to expand...

lol, yeah I know about the bar but it doesn't say how long it is going to take, just "preparing backup". Doing it now and it has already taken 6 minutes and counting... How long does yours take you? Is 20-30 minutes normal?
 
20 - 30 minutes is too much for an hourly, the only time one of my hourly backups took that long was when i created a huge final cut express video. it should be like 5 - 10 minutes tops.
 
bigjnyc said:
20 - 30 minutes is too much for an hourly, the only time one of my hourly backups took that long was when i created a huge final cut express video. it should be like 5 - 10 minutes tops.
Click to expand...

Ok appreciate that. Apparently I have 11GB to back up 😱 Maybe I did a bit of abnormal activity. 5/10 mins sounds more reasonable. Cheers. With the time machine scheduler I will reduce it to 12 hourly backups. Should be enough frankly.
 
kdum8 said:
lol, yeah I know about the bar but it doesn't say how long it is going to take, just "preparing backup". Doing it now and it has already taken 6 minutes and counting... How long does yours take you? Is 20-30 minutes normal?
Click to expand...

Yeah thats normal. The 20 to 30 minutes would be pushing it for me, but I assume that varies with what you do. Larger files will obviously take longer to back up. Once its done "preparing backup" it will switch over to "Backing Up" and show progress (eg- 5MB of 65MB total)

But maybe somebody else can chime in and say whether or not thats normal for a backup.
 
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