Can I change the time and frequency that my Time Machine runs? I only want it to run once a day at 5:30 p.m. I have a 24" iMac running Snow Leopard backing up to Western Digital 2TB drive.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Time Machine Settings
- Thread starter GeneinTO
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
basher
macrumors 6502a
Does this still work under Lion now that Lion has local backups as an option?
talmy
macrumors 601
Running TimeMachine once per day reduces its ability to recover from accidental deletions and changes, a major feature of that program. If you just want daily backups consider getting CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! which can be scheduled to clone the drive at the end of the day.
I use SuperDuper in addition to time machine. You point out an important feature, accidental deletions, but not if done less than 1 hour from the last time machine backup. I like the ability to modify the schedule to something like every three hours. Often I get a slowdown (even on an iMac 27 3.4 2011) beach ball when time machine runs to an external firewire disk (may be backing a movie download from itunes)
basher
macrumors 6502a
You sure it's TM that's the source of your slowdown? I have the same iMac with a GoFlex FW drive attached and never experience any slowdown when TM runs. And at times it's backing up 50GB+
You're always going to experience some lag since you have multiple disks reading and writing at the same time. It's usually not huge but it can definitely be noticeable with large backups if you have slow internal and external drives.
If you have a RAID 0 SSD backing up to a RAID 5 thunderbolt enclosure, you're probably not going to notice anything. A 1TB 5400 RPM internal drive backup up to a NAS or USB drive is going to cause issues accessing other media/files on those drives.
sgtbob
macrumors regular
Time Machine
My Time Machine seems to backup every hour, every day, then every week. What happened to the backups prior to a week ago? I have not changed any of the settings, but in trying to find an issue of a month ago is no longer possible. Any idea what has occurred. I have a 500 GB HDD as the backup destination.
Bob😕
My Time Machine seems to backup every hour, every day, then every week. What happened to the backups prior to a week ago? I have not changed any of the settings, but in trying to find an issue of a month ago is no longer possible. Any idea what has occurred. I have a 500 GB HDD as the backup destination.
Bob😕
talmy
macrumors 601
Should be there unless you run out of room or the file wasn't around longer than a week. It backs up every hour but deletes backup sets so you should at least have one per week for as long as you have been running Time Machine.
sgtbob
macrumors regular
Time Machine
thanks for the reply - and I agree - but the operative word is 'should' - nevertheless, all data has vanished from the external HDD prior to last week. A real Bummer and particularly scary is that I know not what happened - since I changed nothing that I can see.😕
thanks for the reply - and I agree - but the operative word is 'should' - nevertheless, all data has vanished from the external HDD prior to last week. A real Bummer and particularly scary is that I know not what happened - since I changed nothing that I can see.😕