Time Machine Tips
This article is part 3 of a series of Quite Useful articles on backups.
If you haven’t tried out Apple’s Time Machine yet it’s worth checking out. USB drives are now so cheap it makes for an affordable and largely hassle-free backup solution. I’ve used it since Leopard came out and haven’t had any major problems.
Networked Backups
If you’ve got Apple’s Time Capsule or an Airport Extreme you can backup over wireless or ethernet (the disk has to be formatted as HFS+ with journaling). Wireless is great for general use but the first backup you do will be extremely slow. Try doing the first backup by plugging your USB drive straight into your Mac. Time Capsule can be plugged in with gigabit ethernet, which should be slightly faster than USB.
Apple Insider had a great article comparing Time Capsule performance.
Scheduling
I work all day on Macs, and Time Machine backups were running every hour. This actually had a noticeable effect on performance when I run a lot of stuff (Photoshop + Illustrator + Xcode + Time Machine = certain doom.) I found a good solution was to run backups less often.
To control scheduling I use TimeMachineEditor. There’s also TimeMachineScheduler. I’ve set mine to back up every 4 hours, which seems safe enough and cuts down my performance issues.
Other Performance Tips
Showing the Time Machine status in the menu bar makes it easier to stop or start backups in case you want to effectively pause them. Go to System Preferences, Time Machine, and click Show Time Machine status in the menu bar.
If your Finder or file open dialogues seem to cause the dreaded beachball a lot, it could be because your backup disk is going to sleep. Go to System Preferences, Energy Saver and check that Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible is not selected. This doesn’t work for all drives. I have a WesternDigital 5000AAJ USB drive that sleeps no matter what I do, so I get a few beachballs throughout my day’s work. I also have a Toshiba 1GB drive that doesn’t sleep, so check out some reviews before you buy a new USB drive.
Ignore large files you don’t need to back up: Go to the Time Machine preferences, and click the Options… button. I added my Mail caches to this list because Time Machine seemed to be backing up caches of my IMAP accounts which contain thousands of files and caused performance overheads.
Run a backup from the command line with this command:
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper -auto
