Stop Catalina timemachine cacheing preferences?

[andye19]

Hi. I want to slow down the interval for timemachine so a backup has chance to complete before the next one starts. Plus my NAS is permanently thrashing...

For a start, I turned debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled to 1 (as having it as a low priority process is insane). It helps a little.

Now I went into /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-helper.plist (using disabled SIP) and successfully changed the Interval & Delay from 3600 (1hr) to 14400 (4 hrs).

But the bloody thing is still running every hour. It must be cacheing these preferences somewhere!

Any ideas how to flush the cache?
TIA from a new member.

 

[Taz Mangus]

Take a look at Time Machine Editor, it can give the capability to select how often Time Machine run.

TimeMachineEditor

tclementdev.com

 

[andye19]

Take a look at Time Machine Editor, it can give the capability to select how often Time Machine run.

TimeMachineEditor

tclementdev.com

Good call, Taz- thanks. I was hoping for pointer to a command-line solution, though.

 

[satcomer]

Good call, Taz- thanks. I was hoping for pointer to a command-line solution, though.

The web site told you the command line to do manually!

man tmectl

Just use this command’s manual to formulate your own command line to change the setting manually!

 

[Taz Mangus]

The web site told you the command line to do manually!

man tmectl

Just use this command’s manual to formulate your own command line to change the setting manually!

I don't think Catalina supports the tmectl command line tool. I just tried to use it from the command line and it does not seem to exist any longer.

 

[gilby101]

Leave TM settings alone. You won't fix anything that way - only cause more grief.

TM will not start a new backup if one is still running. Just let it complete the first backup.

 

[ignatius345]

Good call, Taz- thanks. I was hoping for pointer to a command-line solution, though.

Just so you know, TimeMachineEditor only needs to run once. You don't need to keep it running after you use it to alter the interval preference. I'm not entirely sure what setting it writes to, but it works quite nicely.

Leave TM settings alone. You won't fix anything that way - only cause more grief.

I disagree. My backup drive is loud and slow, and I don't need hourly backups. I used TimeMachineEditor to specify twice-daily backups and have had no issues whatsoever -- other than not hearing my desktop drive grinding away constantly.

Someday, SSDs will be cheap enough that I can afford to banish this 5TB Toshiba to hell where it belongs and not care about hourly backups. But until then, this works just fine.

 

[Honza1]

I don't think Catalina supports the tmectl command line tool. I just tried to use it from the command line and it does not seem to exist any longer.

try tmutil

 

[Taz Mangus]

try tmutil

tmutil does not have any options to adjust how often a backup will occur, that I could find.
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From TimeMachineEditor:

How does it work?​

TimeMachineEditor triggers Time Machine backups when it is most appropriate, the whole backup process is still handled by Time Machine. TimeMachineEditor is not a “hack”, it does not modify system files.​

​

FAQ​

Should I disable automatic backups in System Preferences > Time Machine?​

Yes. Doing this disables the default one-hour scheduler which is what you want since you will now be using TimeMachineEditor to schedule the backups.​

​

This tells me that TimeMachineEditor is probably running tmutil on its own time schedule. Maybe something like a cron job.