You might think hourly backups are a bit excessive. Apple does not give you a convenient way to change the default backup schedule. Luckily this is easy. Here are two ways you can change the hourly backup schedule to one of your choosing.

Modifying the system files

If you just want to change the default interval and not schedule anything fancy, follow this method.

Warning: this tutorial involves modifying System files. As always, be sure to make copies of the original files before changing anything.

1. Navigate to

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

You’ll see a list of .plist files. Scroll until you see com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

2. Make a copy of this file somewhere else on your hard drive.

3. Verify that you (as an administrator of your machine) can Read and Write to this file. Highlight com.apple.backupd-auto.plist and “Get Info” (Command + I). If you don’t see “admin – Read & Write” or “[your username] Read & Write” you’ll need to add yourself to the list.

4. Open this file with a text editor. Property List Editor doesn’t let me save any changes for some reason.

5. In a text editor, find the lines

<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>

Change 3600 to the amount of time you want between backups in seconds.

6. Save and you’re finished.

Time Machine Editor

Another way to manage your Time Machine backups is the very handy TimeMachineEditor utility. In addition to changing the default backup interval, it allows you to dictate your hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backup schedules with a very high level of detail.

Assign the rules you want and then click “Apply.”

TimeMachineEditor is free.

Do you have any other methods you use to increase Time Machine’s functionality? Leave them in the comments!

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• 4 Photography Apps For Busy Photographers [Mac]

Automator

Batch renaming in Automator is quite simple, even if you’ve never used it before.

1. Open Automator, choose “Custom” when the screen prompts you to select a starting point.
2. Drag the Automator action “Get Specified Finder Items” to the right-hand window pane.
3. Drag the Automator action “Rename Finder Items” to the right-hand window pane.

Note: You will be prompted to add a “Copy Finder Items” action.  If you want to be safe you could add this as well, but I usually don’t.

With Automator you can change the file name in the following ways:

• Date/Time
• Text
• Change Case
• Make Sequential
• Replace Text
• Name Single Item

The options are fairly self-explanatory, but there are some limitations.

Date/Time- you can only add a date or a time stamp, but not both.  The stamp can only be added at the beginning or end of the file name.

Text- You can only add text at the beginning or end of the file name.

Change Case- You can only change the entire file name or extension at once.  You can’t, for example, change moscow.jpg to Moscow.jpg.

Make Sequential- You can only add a sequence at the beginning or end of a file name.

Replace Text- This is where I think Automator really falls short.  You can only replace a specific string, meaning the file name has to contain what you want to replace in order for Automator to do anything. What if I wanted to remove the last 3 characters from a file name and replace it with “xyz”?  Not in Automator.

Name Single Item- I don’t know why you wouldn’t just change the name of the file in Finder without launching Automator, but for completeness the feature is included. You can change the base name (file name without extension), full name (file name with extension), or extension only.

- Choose which action you want and adjust the parameters of the action to suit your needs.

- Drag the Finder items to be renamed into the proper Window.
(Note: with “Get Specified Finder Items“, Automator will not distinguish between directories and files when running.  If you want to drag a folder into Automator and have it work on the folder’s contents, use “Get Folder Contents.”)

- Press “Run.”

Automator is included with OS X and is located in the Applications directory by default.

Name Mangler

Name Mangler picks up where Automator falls short. While Automator has a wealth of other actions that you might find useful, Name Mangler does one thing and does it well.

To rename files, drag them into the left-hand window pane. The list of files pops up, and you can select filters (Folders, Folder Contents, Files) to dictate what gets renamed. This also means you can just drag a Folder into NM to rename the contents.

NM offers the following default options:

• Find and Replace- includes regular expression matching and an option to preserve extensions and ignore case.
• Number Sequentially- Allows you to number in steps other than one, set a prefix and suffix, keep or remove the original name and extension.  Unlike Automator, NM allows you to define a prefix or suffix to the sequence.
• Change Case- Allows Capitalization, all capitals, or all lowercase.  Allows similar preservation or changing of extensions.
• Set Extension- fairly self-explanatory.
• Add Prefix/Suffix- again, self-explanatory.
• Remove/Insert Characters- this is where NM really has an advantage over Automator.  You can remove any number of characters from a file name and specify an index to start with.  So for example if you had a series of files named
  Lyrics_ACT01_Maria.txt
  Lyrics_ACT01_Tonight.txt
  Lyrics_ACT02_TheRumble.txt
  Lyrics_ACT02_Somewhere.txt

  You could remove the “ACTXX” characters very easily by defining the number of characters to be removed (5) and the index to start removing at (8- the 8th character from the beginning, starting at 1).  Furthermore, you can replace those same characters by inserting text at a specified index.  Instead of “ACTXX” I might want “WestSideStory.”  To make things even more customizable, you can specify whether the index should count from the beginning or the end of the file name.

But perhaps the most powerful feature included with Name Mangler is the ability to thread together multiple functions in the “Advanced” window. It’s name conversion description language allows you to write pseudo-scripts to tailor your file names to what you want. It might seem a little daunting, but it’s actually very easy for even a beginner with no programming knowledge to pick up the basics after reading the documentation.

Finally, Name Mangler allows you to save your settings as droplets so you can just drag and drop a collection of files to be renamed without actually launching the program.

I use Name Mangler almost exclusively at this point and haven’t found anything that even begins to compare.  Do you know of other free batch renaming utilities?

Related Posts:

• How To Change Your Time Machine Backup Interval
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After reading my recent article about screen-capture utilities for Windows, my friend asked my recommendation of the similar tool(s) in Mac and where can he download it/them. As unbelievable as it might sound, there are many Mac users who do not know that, unlike Windows, Mac OS X comes with built in screen capture utilities.

Here’s how to use them.

Shortcuts to Screenshots

To utilize the first set of screen capture utility, Mac users need to know some shortcuts – key combinations. They are:

1. To capture the entire desktop, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a file on your desktop.
2. To capture a specific area of the desktop, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor (with x and y pixel values to help you measure the area) will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.
3. To capture a specific application window, press Command-Shift-4, and then press the Spacebar. The cross-hair cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop.

Note: You can add Control key to the shortcuts above to place the screen shot on the clipboard instead of saving it to the desktop. For example, the key combination to capture the entire desktop become Control-Command-Shift-3. Then you can paste the shot into another program (such as Photoshop).

Give Way to Grab

Mac OS X also gives you another method for capturing screen shots; using the (often overlooked and forgotten) utility called Grab, located in the Applications > Utilities folder. Grab is useful if you need to include a cursor or a menu in your screen shot, or if you want to save your screen shot to TIFF format.

Another additional feature that make Grab better than Mac’s basic screenshot feature is that Grab will open the result image in a window and let you choose where to save it and under what name you want the saved file to be. This will save time spent on renaming the files later.

1. To capture the screen with Grab, open the app. Then you can choose one of the capture modes from the “Capture” menu: Selection, Window, Screen, Timed Screen.

2. To include a cursor, first go to Grab Preferences and select the cursor icon you wish to have in your screen shot.

3. If you choose the Selection (Command-Shift-A) mode, you can capture a specific area of the screen by dragging your mouse around it. Just like the basic screenshot function in Mac, Grab will display a tooltip showing the size of the region you have selected. No cursor will be shown in this mode.

4. If you choose the Window (Command-Shift-W) mode, an instruction window will appear asking you to select the window you wish to capture. Click the “Choose Window” button then the instructions will disappear and the window you click will be captured, including the mouse cursor at the position where you click (if a cursor was selected in Preferences).

5. If you choose the Screen (Command-Z) mode, an instruction window will appear asking you to click the screen when you are ready to capture. The mouse cursor will be included in your screen shot at the position where you click (if a cursor was selected in Preferences).

6. If you choose the Timed Screen (Command-Shift-W) mode, an instruction window will appear, allowing you to prepare your screen for capture. When you are ready, press the “Start Timer” button and you will have ten seconds before the screen is captured. This allows you to open menus and sub-menus, if necessary. After ten seconds the entire screen will be captured. The mouse cursor will be included in your screen shot if a cursor was selected in Preferences.

I personally prefer the basic screenshot feature of Mac since it’s faster and simpler. But at times when I need advanced screenshot feature, Grab is always there to help.

Do you have other alternatives to capture screenshots in Mac? Share your opinion using the comment below.

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