Chris J Mears

Time Machine has always annoyed me with how frequent it wants to backup.  It takes no consideration what you are currently doing and if you have Time Capsule, your workflow grinds to a complete halt while Time Machine and Time Capsule get buddy-buddy over your network.

My issue is not with Time Machine itself.  It’s a great idea and great program!  I just wish there was a better control panel for it.  Oh well, time to get down and dirty.

From this hint I was able to set the Time Machine backup schedule from one hour to six hours.

Basically, in Terminal, you:

cd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
sudo vi com.apple.backupd-auto.plist


Note: I’m using the vi editor to do this hack. You can choose any editor you wish, just make sure you have proper permissions.

Once open, you change the property:

<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>


Where 3600 is the number of seconds you want Time Machine to run. I changed mine to 21600 and voila!

Now maybe I can play a DVD without Time Machine interupting my full screen.