I use Apple’s Backup.app every day to backup my:

• Address Book
• iCal
• Keychain
• Safari Settings
• Stickies [of which I have zero]

I run a daily full system backup of my iMac using SuperDuper and wouldn’t dream of being without it.

But given Mobile Me’s penchant for sucking when it comes to syncing, I run Backup.app not only on my iMac, but also on my MacBook.

The Annoyance

The problem with Backup.app has always been that it is annoying.

It pops up and bounces in the dock for 2 minutes before it actually backs up anything.

What do I want? I want it to backup my files and leave me alone.

I can solve this on my iMac by having the backup run at 3 a.m. when I am (hopefully!) not using the computer, but the MacBook is usually asleep at that time, so I have it run at 11 a.m.

Given that you have to manually schedule these backups, I’m not sure why Apple thinks that you need to confirm it every.single.time but it does.

The Fix

The simplest solution would be to change the preferences, but oh look there aren’t any. Backup.app doesn’t even have a preferences panel at all. So there goes that.

I finally got fed up enough that I asked Twitter if anyone knew of a solution and @jkestr suggested that I take a look at “defaults read com.apple.backup” in Terminal.

(For the non-Terminal aware, this is a way of looking at an application’s preferences, even if it doesn’t tell you about them. And I really should have thought of it myself.)

I was hoping to find something like “MakeBackupAppBounceAnnoyingly” which I could set to FALSE, but alas, no such luck.

But I found something almost as good:

"Backup Timer" = 120;

Aha! 120 seconds is how long Backup waits (and bounces) before running

I tried:

defaults write com.apple.backup "Backup Timer" 0

thinking that would make Backup just run but all that happened was the app launched but the backup did not actually execute. I tried again with:

defaults write com.apple.backup "Backup Timer" 1

which does work and which limits Backup to just one bounce.

Realizing I wasn’t going to do much better than this, I decided to run Dockless and set Backup.app to not show up in the Dock at all. The two of these combined makes Backup as innocuous as possible.

n.b. I assume everyone else already knows this: but you can set Backup.app to backup to a local drive instead of iDisk. The iMac backs up to Drobo, my MacBook backs up to iDisk.