I don't care to have Time Machine do a backup every hour when my drive is connected. I tried the option to reset the interval time in Terminal (done by seconds but it didn't stick. Is there any good way to reset how often Time Machine backs up?

I don't care to have Time Machine do a backup every hour when my drive is connected. I tried the option to reset the interval time in Terminal (done by seconds but it didn't stick. Is there any good way to reset how often Time Machine backs up?

Why does the interval bug you? The backup process is designed not to hog the processor; in fact, it is very difficult to tell that it is running.

Craig

I don't care to have Time Machine do a backup every hour when my drive is connected. I tried the option to reset the interval time in Terminal (done by seconds but it didn't stick. Is there any good way to reset how often Time Machine backs up?

Take a look here..
TimeMachineScheduler - set the backup interval of Time Machine (http://www.klieme.com/TimeMachineScheduler.html)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding Time Machine's method. I presume it's incremental. But I did notice that in the next hour it backed up over 500MB and I know I didn't edit much at all. Also, doesn't the disk fill up quicker with so many backups? I'd prefer every 5-6 hours.

As far as I know it is incremental, and the retention period of the hourly backups also isn't all that long so I'd just let it do it's thing. It frees up space on the drive as needed by removing older backups.

It is definitely incremental. Do you use one of the virtualization packages that stores the whole other operating system as a file on disk? Or something else that uses one big file (maybe database)? If so, you may want to exclude them from Time Machine and back up some other way.

In general, TM works great and I've used it a couple of times. Once to restore after a hard drive failure and another time to migrate to new hardware. Worked very well.

Craig

Maybe I'm misunderstanding Time Machine's method. I presume it's incremental. But I did notice that in the next hour it backed up over 500MB and I know I didn't edit much at all. Also, doesn't the disk fill up quicker with so many backups? I'd prefer every 5-6 hours.

don't forget that time machine backups contains lots of stuff that you might not have actively changed yourself...plist files that change etc all happen behind the scenes and they are all backed up in a time machine backup