Backing up with Time Machine at a certain time daily

[dtemp]

Hi everyone, I've scoured the internet and come up with the following solution to help me with my problem. I would love any insight on whether or not you believe this will work, as I'm probably going to deploy it to several machines and, for reasons I won't get into, don't want it to fail catastrophically.

Thanks!

PROBLEM:

I want Time Machine to backup my main drive to my backup drive once per day at 8:00 AM (FYI: these are internal drives in a Mac Pro). No hourly backups, no backups ever besides the late AM. I'd like it to backup no matter who is logged in (admin or standard user, or no one at all and the computer is at the login screen). I would like all of the other niceties of Time Machine to work (automatically trashing old backups, etc.)

SOLUTION:

1) In the Time Machine prefpane, choose the backup disk, and make sure "Notify when old backups are deleted" is unchecked (this setting is appropriate for me). Leave the big switch set to OFF.

2) In /Library/LaunchAgents, make a file "com.mykludge.timemachine.custom.plist" with the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.mykludge.timemachine.custom</string>
<key>LowPriorityIO</key>
<true/>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper</string>
</array>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>8</integer>
<key>Minute</key>
<integer>0</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

3) Restart for good measure

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Or you could use this: http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/

 

[GGJstudios]

Or you could use Carbon Copy Cloner, which has such scheduling capabilities built in.

 

[PatrickCocoa]

Here's what I want

I want Time Machine to backup my main drive to my backup drive once per day at 8:00 AM

The heart wants what the heart wants, but my take is you're wanting it wrong.

Time Machine was designed to be "plug it in and forget it". It purposely doesn't have many user-exposed options. Don't try to make it do what it's not designed to do.

I see you've solved your problem using Time Machine, but you should have used a more appropriate tool.

 

[dtemp]

Or you could use this: http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/

I looked at that, but I'm not sure if this creates schedules that are independent of the user logged in, and if only admins can change the settings. There are standard accounts on this computer that should not be able to change this setting.