By default, when using Time Machine on Mac OSX, it runs a backup every hour. Depending on your backup setup, it may make sense to lower this frequency to once a day, or once every few hours.
I changed this on my setup because I have several Macs backing up to a Drobo FS, because the Drobo isn’t nearly as fast as a dedicated server, all of these backups running at once or very frequently can slow things down.
So here is how you do it.
- Decide how frequently you’d like your backup to run
- Calculate how many seconds are in the amount of time that you picked (use this calculator)
- Open up Terminal.app, you can find this in your Applicatons/Utilities folder, or you can just type it in Spotlight (magnifying glass in the top right of your screen)
- Copy and Paste: sudo nano /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist into the Terminal window.
- Enter the password on your mac (while typing, it will be blank, just hit enter when finished)
- If successful, a window like this will open:
- Use your arrow keys to navigate to the field that says <integer>number of seconds</integer>
- Change the number (default is 3600) to your desired time.
- To save the file, press Control + O, then hit enter to save it.
- Lastly, press Control + X to exit nano (unix text editor) and close terminal.
- Rebooting your computer will make these changes take effect
I can confirm this works on Mac OSX Lion 10.7.3