Some Command line hacks to speed up TimeMachine backups

Made some big changes to my photos library and need my TimeMachine on Big Sur to backup faster over the network to my Drobo.

Searched and found a few tips. First one is this command to remove process throttling:

 sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0 

This still was not enough so then I also tried the renice command:

sudo renice -n -20 -p 565

To get the process id I just used activity monitor and looked for “backupd” in the Activity monitor.

Now I see the “backupd” process jumping up to as much as 50% of the CPU. Since I am on an Apple Silicon M1 I wasn’t too worried about it slowing down.