Time Machine Editor is a free utility that gives you some nice control over Apple’s Time Machine application. One of the awesome things about Apple’s Time Machine application is that it runs an incremental backup every hour of the day. While this is great for home users, it can cause some potential headaches in a business network environment because it creates the potential for many different users to have Time Machine running and writing backup jobs over the network at any given moment. Even on a Gigabit network this could cause noticeable bandwidth degradation.

Time Machine Editor allows you to manually set the times at which Time Machine runs incremental backup jobs. You have two options. You can set an interval for a number of hours. For example, Backup every 4 hours. The other option is to set a calendar interval where you can choose multiple daily, weekly, or monthly backup times. Apple didn’t include this functionality in Time Machine because they wanted to keep it dead simple for home users. 

We’ve deployed this utility for several clients now and it has worked flawlessly for us from day 1. We strongly recommend it if you have multiple users running Time Machine over the network. If you have questions about getting Time Machine Editor deployed feel free to contact us.