![]() Suppose Time Machine’s options don’t provide enough flexibility for you, and you don’t want to get into creating your own cron jobs. ![]() You can verify that your backup ran by waiting until after the scheduled time, and once the backup has completed, you should see it in Time Machine or even in the Time Machine settings where it shows the Last backup. This is because we are actually running the backup manually it’s just that crontab will be running it on its schedule, and the Time Machine utility does not know about that. Keep in mind that you will not see a Next backup scheduled in the Time Machine settings. The -e parameter stands for edit and allows you to edit the crontab file. Step 2: Open the crontab file using the crontrab command. Use whatever method you prefer to start up the Terminal application. Then follow the steps below to schedule a backup using crontab. You can use the steps in the previous section to verify and/or change this if needed. Make sure that Time Machine’s backup frequency is set to Manually. I will use nano in the example below just to make things a bit easier, but if you prefer to use vi, you can just leave the VISUAL=nano part out of the command. For some, this may be ok, but if you prefer to open it with another editor such as nano, you can do so by specifying the editor in the crontab command as shown below. This is done with the crontab -e command, which will open the crontab file in an editor.īy default, your system will open it with the vi editor. Once you have figured out your schedule and know how to format it with your command, you will need to enter it into crontab. I highly suggest it if you decide to use this method and are not already familiar with cron. For example, if I want it to run at 12:30 and 8:30 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, The command would be:Īs you can see, there are many ways to set this up, and I won’t dig into this part any deeper. This can get more complicated if we want to add more times and specific days. ![]() If I wanted to run my backup every day at 12:30, the command would look like this: (Note: These steps are from the latest Ventura macOS but may be slightly different if you use an earlier macOS version.) Step 1: Open System Settings.Ĭlick on the Apple symbol in the upper left corner of the screen and select System Settings. When you are ready to do this, you can use the following steps. To do this, you will want to set it up at the particular time and/or day you want it to run each time. If the settings available in Time Machine are adequate for your backup requirements, you can easily set up a basic schedule using its settings. Let’s first go through the basic configuration of Time Machine, and then we can look at some of the other methods. For example, you might want to run them twice a day, or you may want to run them 3 or 4 times a week, and you may want to run them at times when you are not busy using your computer.Īlthough Time Machine does not inherently provide this configuration, there are a couple of methods you can use that will give you much more flexibility in scheduling your backups. Some users may require more options for when and how often Time Machine runs backups. These basic selections can work great for some, and as long as you enable it at the time you want it to run, you have some control over it. If weekly is selected, it will run on that same day every week at 8:05. If you choose to run daily, it will run at 8:05 each day. For example, if it is 8:05 and you choose hourly, it will run at 9:05, 10:05, 11:05, and so on. If you choose hourly, daily, or weekly from the selection above, the backup will start running as soon as you enable this and continue at the frequency you select every hour, day, or week. ![]() If you have already tried this, you have seen that the only options are to schedule Time Machine to run manually, hourly, daily, or weekly. In my opinion, it should be, but for some reason, Time Machine does not provide many options for scheduling backups. Is there a way to view the current cron jobs that are scheduled?Ĭhanging the Backup schedule in TimeMachine seems like it would be a fairly simple process.Will Crontab work when my computer is turned off?.Step 5: Once you have selected the frequency, click the Done button.Step 4: Select the frequency option you want to use.Step 4: On the Options screen click on the Back up frequency dropdown.Step 3: Select Options on the Time Machine screen.Step 2: Select General and then Time Machine.
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