Time Machine Interval

Hi peterfromerlangen,

I understand you wish to change the interval time when Time Machine backs up your Mac. You cannot change the interval. However, you can turn off automatic backups, and choose to manually backup your computer when it is more convenient for you.

Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac

Back up using Time Machine

After you set up Time Machine, it automatically makes hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months. The oldest backups are deleted when your backup drive is full.

• To back up now instead of waiting for the next automatic backup, choose Back Up Now from the Time Machine menu .
• To stop automatic backups, turn off Time Machine in Time Machine preferences. You can still back up manually by choosing Back Up Now from the Time Machine menu.
• To pause a backup, choose Stop Backup from the Time Machine menu. To resume, choose Back Up Now.
• To check backup status, use the Time Machine menu. The icon shows when Time Machine is backing up , idle until the next automatic backup , or unable to complete the backup .
• To exclude items from your backup, open Time Machine preferences from the Time machine menu, click Options, then click Add and select the item to exclude.

Your first backup may take a long time, depending on how many files you have. You can continue using your Mac while a backup is underway. Some Mac computers make backups even when asleep. Time Machine backs up only the files that changed since the previous backup, so future backups will be faster.

Cheers,

Actually, you can change the interval, though there is little point in doing so. This article covers the options:

http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/02/change-the-time-machine-backup-schedule/

However, once TM has made one copy of your entire disk, it only copies over the files that have changed since the last backup. If no files have been modified in the last hour, it won't backup anything.

All you achieve by increasing the interval is increasing the time in which a file can be deleted with no recovery. You don't save space.