Folder Backup Using Automator

It's been a while since my last blog posting. Having recently come across Automator, it seemed a good topic for a posting.

For the past several releases, Mac OS X has included both a scripting language (AppleScript) and a workflow automation tool known as Automator. This blog post discusses how an Automator workflow can be designed to use one Mac as the source for a backup process. The target could be a share on a fileserver or another Mac that needs to be kept in step with the source machine.

As an example of this, I have a desktop Mac (a recent iMac) and an older MacBook Pro that I carry to clients’ offices. As one who enjoys music, I want to have my iTunes library available on both systems; however, as I manage the library from the desktop system, I don’t have a need to synchronize the two, just to ensure new music files are copied to the laptop. I’ve therefore set up an Automator “workflow” (the set of steps required to carry out the file transfer) that I can schedule via iCal. Automator uses a drag-and-drop process, where the required “actions” are dragged from the Automator Library into the workflow space. In our example of managing iTunes files, the workflow steps can be viewed in the following video:

http://vimeo.com/12349673

Notes

The AppleScript mount and dismount scripts look like this:

mount volume "afp://'IP address'/'server_volume'" as user name "name" with password "password"

do shell script "umount /Volumes/'server_volume'"

As well as using the remote system’s IP address, its fully qualified domain name can be used instead (e.g. macbook-wlan.douganconsulting.com in the case of the MacBook above). “server-volume” is the name the remote system uses for the drive to be mounted. The MacBook’s disk name is MacHD - yours may be different.

The third-party Backup folder action can be downloaded from here.