Ever since I began using Time Machine during my internship at Apple a few months ago, I’ve wanted to be able to force a backup immediately, rather than having to wait around for it to happen when Time Machine decides it’s time. I figured that there would be some UI for this added eventually, but it never happened. Fortunately, Jonathan Wight of Toxic Software mentions in this tweet how you can begin a backup from the command line. Seeing as it would be helpful to have this as an application that can be launched at will, here is one. It’s just an Applescript application which contains one line:

do shell script "/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper >/dev/null 2>&1 &"

You can download it here. Thanks schwa!

[Update]: Alright, so apparently you can right-click on the Time Machine icon and select “Backup Now”. However, this is only if Time Machine is in the Dock and I really do not want to keep it in my Dock at all, so I’ll stick with this Begin Backup method.