Hey Everybody,
In a recent past episode Gavin talked about backing up your data. A task that many of use agree should be done regularly, however neglect or forget to do.
I thought I would pass along a quick tips that I use on my Mac to try and keep my backups more regular and consistent.
It involves Automator and iCal and the Energy Savings System Preferences.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to play around with Automator, I would strongly suggest to take an hour and open up the program. Automator is basically a user friendly version of Apple scripts, its a program designed to take care of repeative annoying tasks, such as backing up!
Within an hour of playing with Automator I imagine the majority of users would have been able to create a basic backup application. I would have included my own automator backup program, however it would likely be of little use since everyone likely backs up to different locations. However, the majority of my steps come from the finder package in Automator. Basically its choosing the following steps, Open a location (either an external drive, or netowork location), tell Automator to Copy your particular folder and subsequently paste it to the location you selected. Then disconnect the external or network drive.
So lets imagine you have played around on Automator and created your own backup program, save it as an application in a suitable location and test it just to make sure its going to work.
Here is the tip to daily backups that can occur anytime you want. Open up iCal and create an Appointment, under the Alarm Section choose Open File and choose the newly created backup program you just made in Automator. Now choose to repeat the appointment and choose when you want to repeat it (eg daily). Now after you have setup iCal your appointment will trigger the backup program to run at the time of day you specified and the day(s) you chose to run the Appointment.
Now most people really don’t want to run backups while there working on there computer, they can take up a lot of time and memory. The best time I found to run them is while I’m asleep, however I really don’t like to keep my Mac awake 24h a day 7 days a week. This is were the Energy Saving System Preferences comes into play. You can wake up and put your computer to sleep at specific times by going to the system preferences, Energy Savings (the lightbulb icon) and clicking on schedule. There you can setup when to wake up your computer and when to put your computer to sleep. Choose at night for it to wake up and then go to sleep shortly after. Allowing your computer to be awake just before the iCal event triggers the Backup program
Here is an example of a daily backup
I close my laptop and put it to sleep around 11pm when I goto bed, at about 4am my computer is told to wake up by Energy Savings. At 4:05am my iCal appointment is triggered and automatically runs the backup program which opens up a network connection and copies all the files in my Picture folder to the network drive. The backup takes about a half hour, so I also told my Mac to sleep at 4:45am. Thats it.
Every day, my computer repeats these tasks ensuring that pictures are stored elsewhere. The great thing about this is that I don’t even think about backups now, I just know its there if I need it. Furthermore with daily backups, even little changes I make get saved just in case anything bad happens.
Cheers
Jeff Tindall
Tips and Tricks Photography
