Time Machine Backs Up Too Often!

So if you have an old machine like me (1.0GHz PPC PowerBook G4), then you've probably noticed that your computer can run pretty sluggish at times. If you look at your active processes you'll most likely see a process called “mds” taking up around 100MB of ram about once every hour for 10 minutes or so. That's time machine looking at your system to see what's changed. Well it just so happens that this interval can quite easily be changed from 3600 seconds (every hour) to anything you want. I switched mine to 14,400 seconds (4 hours for those of you non-math people). This simple act of making my system backup less often is great on my processor and ram!

Here's how you do it:
Navigate to: /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. There you'll find a file named com.apple.backupd-auto.plist. Copy this file to your desktop and then open it with any text editor (or Apple plist editor if you have it!) and look for this section:

Change the 3600 number to some other time interval in seconds, Save and quit, then replace this file back into the LaunchDaemons folder, you'll need to be an admin. Restart your machine you'll have a new Time Machine's backup interval!