I love the console (and have also hacked one of my Macs to display the syslog on my desktop) but for many of my clients, the console and backupd logs are a mystery best avoided. This app makes it easy to see why TM bailed on a backup without having to filter on backupd entries in the console.

This app is mostly harmless.

I do have some cautions on changing the TM interval though. Generally hourly backups are painless. The system keeps track of what needs to be backed up via filesystem events and the standard period of backup events is a good compromise to keep each backup load fairly light.

Extending this period has the downside of

• making the backup load higher
• reducing the ability to get back a file that you changed only a few hours earlier
• increasing the likelihood of the dreaded Time Machine requires deep traversal when the FSevents are corrupted or out of sync with the last backup.