This piece is a continuation from an app-to I published a few days ago. Currently, Time Machine does not natively support hourly local snapshot creation when the backup schedule is set to daily. Although it sounds counterintuitive, the key here is “local snapshot”. Time Machine runs on snapshots, capturing what has changed at every interval. Creating a snapshot locally is a light task, whereas pushing the snapshot to a remote location isn’t. Hence why I searched for a solution.

I am writing this how-to on the assumption that you are using TimeMachineEditor (TME) or an equivalent third-party tool to modify Time Machine behavior. Once again, I want to emphasize Time Machine does not natively support this setup. However, the result will be rather similar to the automatic hourly backup on native settings.

1. Enable “Create local snapshots every hour” in TME.
2. Change the schedule to either every day or a certain time* of every day.
   

* I recommend using a certain time of every day (like cron), and setting it to when the Mac would have an uninterrupted connection to the destination.

To elaborate on why I recommend this particular setup, Time Machine is not alien to local hourly snapshots. Not only do they load faster than the remote ones, Time Machine often fails to fill all 24 hourly slots to begin with, either because it took too long or because the connection was unstable. Local snapshots compensate for that in native Time Machine “hourly” settings (not in daily), and in the setting I propose. Pairing them with a daily network backup delivers what I’d call best of both worlds: local for speed and coverage, remote for safety.