Getting Time Machine to only back up when idle My TM backups are causing some disruption to my work while they're running, be it a backup to a network drive that's taking up all available wifi bandwidth or a backup to an attached zfs volume which causes very heavy cpu usage (due to the gzip-9 compression settings I use...)

I'm looking for some way, even a dirty hack, to get TM backups to only start while the computer is idle for over a few minutes and to stop when mouse/keyboard activity resumes.
TM is by default set to 60 minutes interval.

But you can change that to, lets say, 5 hours or any number without any hack.

Run this command in Terminal using seconds.


  sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 18000