Time Machine (TM for short) is Apples take on consumers needs to make backup of your files. You can make backups to either removable drives like USB drives or a network drive over Apple Filing Protocol (AFP). There is hacks to get TM to make backup on to other things as well, but that is beside the scope of this intro.
I use a Qnap TS-410 for my Time Machine needs. But I also use CrashPlan to make a off-site backup of my files, no point on having a backup of my files in the house, if the house burns down.
For business users, I recommend looking at somehing more "enterprise" ready software like IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
First of all, there is no need to backup all the files in your home folder (/Users/"username"), so take your time to exclude files/folders that you do not need backup of. Like your Downloads, Dropbox, Desktop folders and so on.
But you really want backup of your Documents and Library folders.
To exclude files/folders use the command tmutil addexclusion.
tmutil addexclusion Desktop Downloads Dropbox Google\ Drive SkyDrive
If you use VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, they store their virtual machines in the Documents folder. If you don't need a backup of them, remember to exclude them, but not the Documents folder it self.
If you have excluded a file or a folder that you realice that you need to have in your backup, use the command tmutil removeexclusion.
tmutil removeexclusion Documents
If you are not sure if a file or folder is included or excluded from your backup set, use the command tmutil isexcluded to see the status.
john at pinova in ~
$ tmutil isexcluded Dropbox/
- /Users/john/Dropbox
The "-" sign means that the item is excluded from your backup set.
john at pinova in ~
$ tmutil isexcluded Documents/
+ /Users/john/Documents
And the "+" sign means that the item is included in your backup set.
You can also check all the items in your home folder by using tmutil isexcluded *. But it will not show you the status of subfolders or files.
To be able to make a backup, TM needs to be told where to make those backups.
sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/mydisk
sudo tmutil setdestination afp://user[:pass]@host/share
To make TM make backups, we need to enable the software, this is done with the command sudo tmutil enable. Likewise we can disable TM with sudo tmutil disable.
TM supports local "backup", this is not a true backup, but a place holder while you are disconnected from your TM device. This means that TM will take its hourly backup, but store them locally until you have connected your devices again. If your hard drive fails, your local backups will also be lost.
To enable local "backup", run tmutil enablelocal, to disable it run tmutil disablelocal.
TM will make a backup every hour, but sometimes you want it to make a backup right now, this is done with tmutil startbackup. This is useful if you just have done some work, and are going away, just run the command before you shutdown your computer. Or you can make an alias of it in your .profile.
alias dobackup="tmutil startbackup"
Next time you want to make a TM backup, run the command dobackup.
You can also stop a running backup with tmutil stopbackup.
To view the latest backup that TM have made, run the command tmutil latestbackup.
john at pinova in ~
$ tmutil latestbackup
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/pinova/2012-06-19-023144
To view all the backups that TM have, run the command tmutil listbackups.
john at pinova in ~
$ tmutil listbackups
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/pinova/2012-05-13-155604
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/pinova/2012-05-20-000215
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/pinova/2012-05-21-000219
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/pinova/2012-05-27-152658
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/pinova/2012-05-28-192633
-- snip --
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/pinova/2012-06-19-003223
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/pinova/2012-06-19-012408
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/pinova/2012-06-19-023144
By default, TM does not make a backup if your laptop is running on battery power, but you can override this.
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine RequiresACPower 0
By default, TM makes a backup every hour. This can be overridden by changing the default values in com.apple.backupd-auto.plist (this file is located at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/)
<key>Backup Interval</key>
<dict>
<key>Interval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>
<key>MaintenanceWakeBehavior</key>
<string>Once</string>
</dict>
Change the integer interval (value in seconds) from 3600 (every hour) to 14400 if you only want it do make backups every four hours.
By default OS X asks if you want to make the USB disk you have just connected for Time Machine, this is annoying after awhile, you can override this with:
defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES
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