HT201250: Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac
Learn about Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac
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Helpful answers
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Aug 8, 2015 6:33 PM in response to Allan Eckertby Richard Wood (bis),I want to do this because I tend to have my computer on (and awake) almost every hour that I'm awake, typically playing music (I don't watch television).
Backing up every hour means that four or five times each evening, the software spins up my external USB drive just to write an absurdly small amount of data.
And what I use the machine for on a typical day to to check email (in the cloud), social media (one the web), and read the news (on the web). There are undoubtedly caches that have new data, but I'd prefer Time Machine to have an option that checks what files have been changed and how much, and only backs up one a day or so when my usage volume is low.
Richard
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Aug 8, 2015 6:47 PM in response to Richard Wood (bis)by Allan Eckert,I do the same thing with my photos on my Mac Pro.
Backing up hourly does not use up the disk space like you think it will.
Every 24 hours, TM consolidates the backups into daily backup. Hence the nightly backups will be eliminated during the daily consolidation. Every month, TM consolidates daily backups into monthly backup. Hence a daily backup when you were in fact not on the machine at all will be eliminated during the monthly consolidation. So TM is designed to handle this problem without any interference from you.
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Aug 8, 2015 6:54 PM in response to Allan Eckertby Richard Wood (bis),Actually, it wasn't disk space that concerns me. My Time Machine drive is an external 1TB drive, but it's backing up a measly 500GB.
It is mostly the wear and tear of waking up 168 times a week when 7 times a week would be adequate, as well as the minor annoyance of hearing the disk spin up in my otherwise fairly quiet study when I'm reading and listening to music.
Oh, and I fairly easily found this free software, which seems adequate to my needs: http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/