Pause is the escape hatch. One click, everything stops, nothing breaks. Use it whenever backup activity would get in the way of what you are doing right now.
When to pause
A few common cases:
- You are rendering a long export and want every available CPU cycle
- You are on a client call and want the uplink quiet
- You are about to plug in a big external drive you do not want snapshotted yet
- You are running a network test and need a clean line
- You just want a minute
Pause is not a configuration change. It is a moment of quiet. The full state resumes exactly where it left off.
Step 1 — Open the menubar
Click the macup icon in the macOS menubar. The popover shows recent activity, current state, and the pause controls.
Step 2 — Pause all
Click Pause all. A duration picker appears with four options:
- 15 minutes — one meeting
- 1 hour — a call plus debrief
- 4 hours — a long render or a flight
- Until resumed — indefinite, you will come back to it
Pick one. The menubar icon changes to a paused indicator so you will not forget.
Step 3 — During the pause
macup keeps watching the filesystem. Every file change you make is captured as a filesystem event and queued. Nothing flushes to a snapshot until you resume. When you do, the queued events roll into the next round — no lost work, just delayed upload.
If a snapshot was in flight when you clicked Pause all, it finishes cleanly. Cancelling mid-round would waste the work already done and create a half-written snapshot that macup would have to discard. Finishing takes, on a typical incremental round, under 30 seconds. In practice, “pause now” feels instant — the UI shows paused immediately while the tail of the in-flight round completes in the background.
Step 4 — Resume
Three ways to resume, in order of how often people use them:
- Click the menubar icon, click Resume
- Let the timer expire
- Use the keyboard shortcut
⌘ + ,to open Preferences, then click Resume on the status strip
Once you resume, the queued events flush into the next round immediately. The first post-resume snapshot is usually the biggest — it is carrying everything that happened while you were paused.
Per-set pause
Pause all is the blunt instrument. Sometimes you want precision.
Right-click a backup set in the menubar popover. Click Pause set. Only that set pauses — every other set keeps running.
Common use: you are travelling, your external-drive set points at a drive you left at home, and you do not want a cloud of “destination not reachable” notifications. Pause the set, unplug, go. Resume when you are back.
The same duration options apply to per-set pause as to global pause.
What pause does not do
Pause is not a stop. It does not delete anything, reconfigure anything, or disconnect from destinations. It does not cancel pending verification. It does not affect scheduled retention policies — those run on a separate timer and will still clean up old snapshots on their normal cadence.
If you want to stop a backup set entirely, disable it from Preferences > Backup Sets. If you want to remove it, delete it from the same pane. Pause is just the pause button.