What owns the Time Machine process?

[michaelsanford]

I've got an older iBook G4 with Leopard. I've always had an (at least perceived) need to alter the nice values of various processes to tune my system's performance.

Now, after looking through the output of `ps ax` and seeing no obviously dedicated process (like TimeMachineAgent or something similar), I was wondering, what process owns Time Machine ?

I hope it's not, but suspect that it is, Finder. Anyone attend the latest WWDC and might know the answer?

[icemanjc]

I'm pretty sure Time Machine is it's own program.

[michaelsanford]

I should have been more specific in my initial post.

I was referring to the backup process, not the application that you use to restore things (which is likely its own application, I agree).

I just assumed that the backup agent must be owned by a super process since there is no process called Time Machine running right now, but a backup process will be invoked within the next 60 minutes, so something has to be waiting to run it...

[eric2006]

From what I've read, Time Machine uses components already in the system to compile a list of file system changes and backup the necessary components. It doesn't need to do anything until the backup, because the list is already constructed. You can read a more knowledgeable explanation here:
http://grep.ro/blog/2007/12/deconstructing_time_machine

[michaelsanford]

Cool, thank you !

[Mikuro]

I have noticed three processes that use a lot of CPU when Time Machine is doing its thing: backupd, mdworker, and mds. I know mds is related to Spotlight. It's been around since Tiger. mdworker is new to me, though, and I don't know what it does. backupd has a pretty clear name, so I assume it's doing the actual work. However, it is not always loaded, so something else must trigger it. Maybe a cron job? Just a guess.

If you do find out how to tweak it, please post how. I think I'd rather Time Machine only did its thing a few times a day instead of every hour. I don't like it causing my backing disk to spin up so frequently, and it does take its toll on performance.

[michaelsanford]

Thanks for the tip.

Speaking of cron, where did that go, anyway? I was looking for it last night, to answer my question, only

ps ax | grep cron | grep -v grep

...returns nothing.

As for tweaking, if I were you I'd have a look for the plist file associated with whatever runs the backup routine. Apple has been good in past with having lots of neat options in plist files that aren't accessible to the user, especially in the initial release of a new piece of software.

For example, in my short rant about losing windows off Spaces (in the common Leopard experiences thread), I had to edit Finder's plist to move the copyprogresswindow co-ordinates back onto the screen...

[michaelsanford]

I seem to have your answer, and perhaps mine, here http://irumors.wordpress.com/2007/11...-backup-times/

It looks like it is indeed owned by “backupd”.