Enhancement request: TM switch

[padmavyuha]

Hello there - Apple have to date not fixed a big bug with Time Machine (which I reported a while back) where it's not smart enough to notice that the current startup volume is different from the one it last backed up from (grrr...)

This means that those of us who clone our startup volume, and then boot into the clone at some point, currently have to remember to turn off TM before starting the clone process (this includes when creating Techtool Pro's eDrives) otherwise when you boot into the clone, TM blithely starts overwriting data in its differential backup using the current startup volume (which is generally not as up to date as the original anyway) and eats loads of TM volume space.

Please could you either add a checkbox to turn off TM for the duration of a clone backup, or just do it behind the scenes? I find it's too hard to remember to do it every time manually. Thanks for listening...

- padmavyuha

[dnanian]

Sorry: there's no documented interface for doing this, so it's not something we're likely to do...

[padmavyuha]

To turn it off:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine AutoBackup -bool false
To turn it on:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine AutoBackup -bool true

Is that not usable for some reason? Meanwhile, I can always put them in pre- and post-flight backup in SD, but it'd be nice to see that built in.

- padmavyuha

[dnanian]

It's not that it's not usable, it's that it's not documented. You're welcome to do it yourself, and even post it here for people to share, but it's not something we're comfortable using because it's not a documented API.

[nriley]

Whoops, please ignore, I somehow missed the answer to my question in the FAQ.

[padmavyuha]

Okay, thanks for explaining. Works fine as a couple of bash scripts - maybe Apple will do something about this at some point anyway :)

- padmavyuha