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How can I make my Macbook automatically shutdown after a Time Machine backup?
I have a 40GB worth backup to do but I keep having to cancel it to go to bed. Would be great if I could leave it on to do it overnight.
Any suggestions of how to do this in ML?
You could setup a crontab to use tmutil through the command line to do a backup and then shutdown. since shutdown requires sudo privs, you have to set your crontab up as sudo.
sudo crontab -e
Enter your password and then that brings you to edit the contab file
shutdown -h now
Shutdown does exactly that but with the -h flag, it halts the system (shutdown). For the shutdown to work, this would have to be setup as an crontab under sudo
tmutil startbackup
Starts the timemachine backup.
Putting it all together:
00 20 ** ** ** tmutil startbackup --block && shutdown -h +5
Would do the backup at 10:00pm every day and then shutdown
sudo zsh -c "tmutil startbackup --block && shutdown -h +5" to run it manually without any additional blocking password prompts. No need to setup crontab, if you don't need it.
Aug 15, 2022 at 21:46
I wanted to be able to leave an existing backup to complete, so my approach is a little different.
The backupd process seems only to be running whilst a backup is underway (and for a minute or two afterwards, from what I've observed) so I logged in as root (so that I can (a) see all users' process and (b) trigger a shutdown) and then polled for the process to finish before shutting down. So:
sudo -s
and enter your password to become root, then:
while ( ps -ef | grep 'backupd$' ); do echo "Still backing up..."; sleep 60; done; shutdown -h +1
to wait for backupd to finish and then shut down. (I used shutdown -h +1 instead of shutdown -h now just to be over-cautious and give it an extra minute to tidy up or whatever before shutting down.)
ps -ef | grep 'backupd$' returns 0 213 1 0 Wed03PM ?? 119:47.66 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd, so the script cannot work. This is Big Sur 11.2.1 (20D74), using an external drive as Time Machine backup drive.
Feb 26, 2021 at 11:01
Assuming you have already set a destination for your TM, you could open a shell in Terminal (or ssh in), sudo su into super-user mode, then run tmutil startbackup --block;shutdown -h now;exit which tells TM to begin a backup immediately, turn off the Mac, and exit the shell. man tmutil for more info.
You could also then add this as a launchctl item or even cron it to schedule.
