I often find myself in the situation where there are too many simultaneous data transfers going on over my Wi-Fi at home: I’ll be watching a TV show on my Apple TV (which streams from the Drobo, see this post for details), transferring media to the Drobo, doing a large svn or git checkout, all of this while Time Machine is wirelessly backing up the Mac.

At this point I’ll often decide to stop the ongoing backup, knowing it will start again an hour later when there is less going on. So far so good. What’s less good is that when Time Machine is doing a very large backup, say 20 gigs, I know I will need to stop it every hour for a while and I’ll sometimes disable it with the intent of re-enabling it once all of the data transfers are done.

This has proven to be a horrible idea: I am missing all of the first half of May and the 2nd half of July. Reason? I completely forgot both times to turn Time Machine back on. Now thanks to Murphy’s Law, you can be sure that the files you’ll need to recover will always happen to fall within the time period where you forgot to re-enable your backup.

I’m tempted to say that disabling your backup is OK as long as you also create a reminder to turn it back on, but chances are you’ll either forget to create it or dismiss it as something you feel confident you’ll remember on your own (you won’t).

Yes, backing up can be inconvenient sometimes, but nothing is more important than keeping your life’s data safe. Don’t disable your backup.
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