Schedule and cleanup

You shouldn’t have to think about backups, so the defaults are built to be left alone.

The schedule

Backups run automatically on a cadence you choose, and they keep running with the window closed — MomentBackup lives in the menu bar or tray and works in the background. On a laptop you can tell it to skip runs on battery or on metered connections; it catches up when conditions are right again.

How history thins out

Keeping every backup forever would fill any drive. MomentBackup thins history the way Time Machine does:

Everything is kept for the first 24 hours,
one backup per day is kept for the first month,
one per week after that.

Recent mistakes stay recoverable at fine grain; old history stays recoverable at the grain that matters. The Schedule & cleanup screen shows exactly what will be kept, and you can pin any snapshot you never want thinned.

Incremental and deduplicated

Only what changed since the last backup is read and stored, and identical data is stored once. In practice that means the first backup takes a while and every later one is small and quick — hourly backups are realistic, not a burden.

Still stuck? Email [email protected] and include what you were doing and what you expected.