Customize Time Machine Backup Times
With the new release of Mac OS X Leopard, over 300 new features have been installed on your Mac. The most talked-about one would be Time Machine by far. Apple include Time Machine, because it will encourage people to backup their files on a more frequent basis. The only feature with Time Machine that bugs me, is that you can set a time to backup, it’s only by the hour. With a little bit of code, Automator, and iCal, I got Time Machine to work when I want it to.
- To start off, open up Automator.
- Select “Custom” in the drop-down menu that appears upon opening Automator.
- Find “Utilities” in the sidebar and then drag “Run AppleScript” to the blank space on the right side.
- Where it says “(* Your script goes here *)”, copy and paste the following code. Here’s the code:
- Go to the File menu in the menubar, and choose “Save as Plug-in”.
- Type in a name for the plug-in.
- Choose “iCal Alarm” under the drop-down menu below the title field.
- After clicking the “Save” button, iCal will open up.
- Switch to iCal, and double click on the application title you just made. It should appear on the day you made it.
- Click on the edit button to change the settings.
- In order for this script to work properly, you must have your hard-drive connected to your Mac at the time the plug-in runs.
- A trick to remind me to turn my hard-drive on is to add another alarm with the event that makes a pop-up message with sound.
- I have my alarm set up so the pop-up message reminds me to turn my hard-drive on, then 2 minutes later the script will run and backup all my data.
do shell script
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper
>/dev/null 2>&1 &
screenshots: 1 2 3 4 5 6-7 9-9_1 12
August 9th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Thank you so much, your tip is really great and runs on my iMac each night ;o)
August 17th, 2008 at 3:07 am
After using the above successfully (thanks) I heard about TimeMachineEditor, Also works quite well: