Continuous backup is quiet when there is nothing to send and loud when there is. After a big import, a project migration, or the first full snapshot, it will use whatever upload bandwidth you give it. Sometimes that is what you want. Sometimes you are on a call.
Why throttle
A 30 Mbps home fibre uplink has roughly 3.75 MB/s to spend. A continuous backup catching up on a 50 GB change can eat all of it. Your video call notices. Your git push notices. Your partner’s Zoom notices.
On symmetric gigabit, you can probably skip this article. On anything consumer-grade, a bandwidth rule is the difference between “backup runs in the background” and “backup interrupts work.”
Step 1 — Open Bandwidth preferences
Go to macup > Preferences > Bandwidth. The top of the pane controls global behaviour; the bottom shows per-destination overrides.
Step 2 — Global or per-destination
Global
A single limit that applies across every destination. Simplest. Good if your only uploading destination is macup Cloud.
Per-destination
Cap cloud destinations while leaving local destinations unrestricted. An external-drive backup on USB has nothing to do with your internet uplink — there is no reason to throttle it. A per-destination rule lets you cap macup Cloud at 5 Mbps and let the external drive run at full USB speed at the same time.
Use per-destination once you have more than one kind of destination. Otherwise, stay global.
Step 3 — Choose a schedule
Always on
A single limit that applies 24/7. Set a number in Mbps and save. Simplest.
Schedule-based
Different limits at different times. A typical creator schedule:
- Weekdays 9am–6pm — 5 Mbps. Quiet during client work.
- Weekday evenings — 25 Mbps. Catch up before bed.
- Nights and weekends — Unlimited. Drain the queue.
Click Add schedule block, pick days, pick hours, pick a limit. Repeat for as many blocks as you need. Overlap rules take the most restrictive limit — safer default.
Step 4 — On battery
Turn on Throttle on battery to cap or fully pause while the Mac is unplugged. Two useful modes:
- Pause — no uploads while on battery at all
- Cap — a low limit (often 1 Mbps) so small changes still flow
Either way, macup resumes full behaviour the moment you plug back in.
Step 5 — On metered connections
macOS knows when you are on a phone hotspot or a metered Wi-Fi network. Turn on Pause on metered connection to stop all uploads on those networks. This is the setting that keeps a continuous backup from quietly spending 20 GB of your phone plan in a coffee shop.
You can combine the toggles: pause on battery, pause on metered, cap at 5 Mbps during work hours, unlimited otherwise. macup applies them in that order — pause beats cap.
A note on what the numbers mean
Bandwidth is measured on the wire. A 5 Mbps limit translates to roughly 625 KB/s of actual file throughput after network overhead. If you are watching the file progress counter in the app and doing math, that is why it does not match the Mbps number on the nose. The wire number is the one your router and ISP see, and the one that matters for staying out of other applications’ way.
Start with a schedule that matches your day, watch it for a week, and adjust. Most people set a rule once and never touch it again.