Now that I am back running Time Machine on my iMac I am looking at ways to set up my back ups in a way that works best for my workflow. In years gone by, I used a little third-party App to schedule Time Machine. I did some searching in the App Store and online and found TimeMachineEditor. This is a neat little App that allows you to schedule Time Machine back ups the way you want. It is currently supported, and it is free.¹ Here is how it works.

TimeMachineEditor

TimeMachineEditor works by updating the Time Machine configuration file on your Mac to match these three files. There's no 'restore to defaults' option in the program but you can easily reset the. Ibroker wrote: Hey thanks for answering guys. Okay I downloaded the widget you advised but it won't allow me to copy & past the results. Drag your mouse from the top of the box to the bottom, then press CMD-C to copy them. Reduce backup frequency with TimeMachineEditor I love the RAID array I have attached to my Mac mini server, with 16TB of data spread redundantly across five physical drives. But those drives are the only classic spinning-disc hard drives left in my house at this point, and I’ve gotten accustomed to the silence of flash storage. Hoopah used the TimeMachineEditor utility to ensure that TM backups did not occur at the same time as the RAID scrubbing. That solved his problem. There is a post from a user Christof Birkenmaier, also on page 4, about how to mount the disk image of the backup and delete the portion of the backup causing the problem.

Timemachineeditor Download

I downloaded TimeMachineEditor from an online third-party Developer. It is free and it is currently supported. Here is the main window of TimeMachineEditor.

There are several settings for you to experiment with. Keep in mind after you have the App set to your preferences, you have to click the “Apply” button for it to take effect.

One of the settings is how you want the overall back up to work. Mine is set to Interval.

If you use the Interval setting, you have to setup the “Back up every” setting. Mine is set to 1 hour.

You can set it to once a day or once a week if you wish.

One of my favorite settings in TimeMachineEditor is “Do not back up from”. I really do not need my iMac to back up while I am sleep. As you can see my iMac is set to not back up from 12 am to 6 am.

Time Machine Editor

You can tell Time Machine to create local snapshots if you wish. There are some Advance Settings.

I have not done much with these, but you could try them out.

There is one last thing you need to know. When you click the Apply button, TimeMachineEditor asks you to go into the Time Machine system preferences and disable “Back Up Automatically”.

That is because TimeMachineEditor is controlling your back ups, not the Time Machine system preference.

Conclusion

If you are using Time Machine and are satisfied with its default settings, then just leave it alone. If you would like to adjust Time Machine’s settings to fit your needs, then TimeMachineEditor is a great way to do that.

Timemachineeditor

1. Many Time Machine control Apps I found were no longer supported[↩]