The IT Nerd

TimeMachine which is Apple’s backup utility is a great way to back up your Mac. But there are two things that annoy me about it. The first is the lack of ability to easily troubleshoot backup issues. As I type this, I am not aware of anyway to improve on that. But what I can improve upon is the configuration options for TimeMachine. By default, this is what you get:

That’s pretty limited. If you want to do something specific like back up at 8PM every day, you can’t. That’s where TimeMachineEditor comes in. It allows you to replace the TimeMachine configuration pane in macOS and give you a lot of scheduling options that the native configuration pane doesn’t offer.

This is how I have it set up for myself. Which is that I have it set to backup at 8PM every day. But here’s the option that you have:

You can set up when the Mac is inactive, at an interval like every day or week, at calendar intervals like every day or week. You can also set options to not backup at certain times, backup immediately if a backup is missed, backup if on battery power (I do not suggest that by the way) as well as creating local snap shots every hour which is a handy way to roll back to an earlier state if you’re on the road. If you click on “Show Advanced Settings”, you get two more options:

You get two options regarding not backing up when an app prevents either the Mac as a whole or the display from sleeping. There are use cases like watching a video for example where you don’t want the Mac to back up because of the potential performance hit.

Once you set everything the way you like it, you simply press apply and you’re done. TimeMachineEditor takes over and runs TimeMachine backups for you. A pro tip that I have is that you should to go into the macOS TimeMachine preference pane and set it to manual so that the two don’t conflict.

I’ve been using this for a few months now and I’ve come across no issues. Thus I can recommend it to anyone who wants to have better control over their TimeMachine backups. Because everyone should be backing up their computer. This app is free, but the developer accepts donations, thus I’d throw him a couple of bucks for his hard work.

Now if someone could make TimeMachine easier to troubleshoot.

This entry was posted on October 31, 2023 at 8:59 am and is filed under Tips with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.