Backing data up is important.

When you’re making lots of incre­men­tal changes over the course of a day, Apple’s Time Machine soft­ware can be a life saver. If at any moment you acci­den­tally delete a file, need to roll back a file, or oth­er­wise review a pre­vi­ous change, you’re able to do so via an … inter­est­ing … inter­face. Regard­less, it has saved me on numer­ous occasions.

Well, some­thing I noticed after a short while is that the Time Cap­sule back­ups tend to kill your net­work con­nec­tion when in use along with taking a long time when using apps that update fre­quently (iTunes library xml files, for exam­ple, are backed up nearly hourly as I listen to a lot of music while work­ing) . Also, once an hour might be too much for a lot of people. Unfor­tu­nately, Apple does not pro­vide an inter­face to make any changes other than ON & OFF. This makes it rather dif­fi­cult to find a good setup that works for each person’s indi­vid­ual needs.

That’s until I found an app called Time Machine Editor. It’s quite simple, and all it really allows you to do is change the fre­quency of your back­ups. You can set it to happen at hour inter­vals (1, 5, 10, 24, etc), or at a cer­tain time every day. I per­son­ally have set my iMac to backup right before lunch (11:30am) and right at the end of the work­day (6pm). This way, I will not be too far behind at any point, but I don’t have to deal with the increased net­work activ­ity or proces­sor usage.

So if you like Time Machine in theory but think that it’s more of a hassle than a help, Time Machine Editor is for you. I hope that with OS 10.6 we see some slight improve­ments to backup cus­tomiza­tion within the actual inter­face of Time Machine. For now, this is the best we can do.