Is TM essentially backing up continously?

[komatsu]

I notice that TM seems to be backing up continuously.

How can can this be changed so it only backups at certain intervals?

 

[MacDawg]

You will need some 3rd party help
Here is one:
https://tclementdev.com/timemachineeditor/

 

[casperes1996]

sudo tmutil disable

This disables automatic backing up

Now you can start a crontab with the tmutil startbackup command to kick off at your own schedule. with the --auto tag to make the system behave like if it were TM that called it itself

 

[komatsu]

Great!

That TM Editor software looks perfect.

When TM is backing up, does the "backup.backup.db" file becomes inaccessible?

 

[casperes1996]

When TM is backing up, does the "backup.backup.db" file becomes inaccessible?

Not sure about the whole database file, but TM does have a locking mechanism. It's not that the entire backups becomes inaccessible though. It may limit writes, but it's mostly just to make sure that TM itself doesn't have two concurrent writes to the same database.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Good advice above.

Make sure you're not including something like a large virtual machine image in your TM backups.