Speed Up Time Machine Backups (and General Backupery) 

More “make sure I can find this later” blogging.

Keir Thomas posted a tip about speeding up Time Machine backups. Run this command in a terminal window:

“sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0”

and the backups will move a bit faster. I’m giving it a shot now because I’ve added a new backup option to my rotation. I found a good 4TB USB drive on Amazon and added it to my Airport Extreme. This acts as a remote Time Machine disk (awesome), which lets me backup my iMac, my laptop, but also my wife’s Mac, which she never remembers to backup (last time she backed it up was in November).

Everything finished pretty quickly except for my laptop (which I can’t leave just sitting around all day—it’s my work machine), which is finally nearing the last few hours of backup.

I’ve become paranoid about having enough backups, just due to the fragility of disks. Knowing that I’ve got at least four backups of my main machine, and two of everything else, makes me feel at least moderately secure.

(I should say, I’m not seeing much evidence that my backup moves noticeably faster, but I wonder if that’s because it’s a network backup.)

(Via Michael Tsai.)