The cron entry in /etc/cron.d/timeshift-hourly sets up the system to check the timeshift setting every hour; the action it takes is determined by the setting in /etc/timeshift.json.
My timeshift setting does a daily backup. What seems to happen is that timeshift decides to do a backup every 24 hours, at the hour of the day when you created your first backup. Thus if you created your first backup at 10am in the morning, your system runs a daily backup everyday at 10am, which is probably not the most convenient time for the system to be busy. I assume that for other schedules (weekly or monthly, etc.), the time of day when the backup occurs will also be at 10am.
I haven't looked into the code to figure out if there is any way to change this behavior (or specify/change the hour of the day the backup occurs). The obvious solution is to create your first backup at the time of day when you least want to be working. A better way is to create a one-time crontab entry to do this (with the command line "timeshift --create -scripted"). But turn off the timeshift scheduling while you are waiting for the first timeshift backup to be created (presumably in the middle of the night). The next day, once the timeshift backup is created, remove the crontab entry, and then turn on the timeshift scheduling.
If you already have backups created, creating a backup in, say 3am in the morning, doesn't change the normal backup schedule. So if your regular backup is at 10am, even though you created a backup at 3am, the next time 10am rolls around, timeshift will still run a backup. The only to change this seems to be to first delete all existing backups.
There's one more wrinkle to this: if you turn off your computer for an extended period of time and miss a couple of hourly checks, the next time you turn on the computer, it seems that timeshift will create a backup as soon as the hour rolls around (so your computer gets really busy almost as soon as you turn it back on).
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