Temporarily Speed up Time Machine Backups With a Terminal Command
Time Machine is a great service for backing up your computer, and by default it doesn’t use a lot of CPU power to do so. This is great in most cases, but sometimes you need to back up as soon as possible. Defaults-Write indicates the Terminal command for this.
To temporarily speed up these backups, open Terminal (Applications> Utilities) and enter the following:
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled = 0
This prevents Time Machine from adjusting itself, which makes it run much faster (and kills your processor’s processing power in the process). After the backup is complete, you can disable it with this command:
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled = 1
It’s not always useful, and you don’t want Time Machine to work as usual, but it comes in handy when you’re just trying to run a backup before walking out the door.
Speed up Time Machine backups | Default – Record