Of many things I have adopted over the course of years, Time Machine is one element that is both most helpful if hell breaks loose and least updated since. I have discussed the shortcomings of Time Machine and shared some of the possible remedies before. Apple’s own iOS backup system supersedes macOS Time Machine. It is remote, and nothing equivalent is offered on the Mac yet. But one feature was added rather recently: rudimentary scheduling.

TimeMachineEditor is free software aimed at providing more customization to Time Machine scheduling. The official options in macOS are: hourly, daily, weekly, or manual. The app not only has interval settings, it can also skip backing up during a ‘do not backup’ window, or while the Mac is in ‘do not sleep’ mode. It can be downloaded either from the website or through Homebrew. Do be sure to set the native schedule in Time Machine to manual (the app will display it as a prerequisite) so the editor can have full control of the scheduling.

It might come off as counterintuitive to put a pause on Time Machine. There are a few scenarios I’ve experienced firsthand. One that caught me most off-guard was Time Machine not releasing files, so the system nightly background tasks all turned up incomplete. The other, more likely scenario most users would see is a partial backup of a given moment while they are working. Time Machine’s hourly backup triggers independently without consideration of what is still being worked on. I recall some of my DIY projects had corrupted snapshots from Time Machine due to a mismatch of files. For more volatile files, I advise weighing the risks before leaving it all up to Time Machine.