I’m pretty good with backups. I have six CD sleeves filled with digital media that spans my professional career back to 1997, and there’s one Holy Grail cataloging app which indexes the entire collection. I’ve been looking, though, for ways to make the process easier and more automated. After all, these are computers, right?
I suppose I could learn UNIX shell scripting and use rsync to do the heavy lifting, but I don’t have that much time. Instead, I’ve decided to bang my head against Apple’s Automator. I’ve been down this path before, as you may remember. This time, I found some help in various places and used a little more common sense to solve my problem.
My needs were this:
On a specified recurring date, make a copy of my Mail folders.
Compress it into a Zip archive.
Move it to my Backups folder.
Open my mail application, and email me a notification.
Simple, right? Some trial and error and six scripts later, I had a working application that did what I wanted it to do reliably, and I’ll share it with you here. (These instructions are for Automator 1.0.5; I haven’t updated to OS X 10.5 yet on this machine).
First, from the Finder actions on the left, drag Get Specified Finder Items over into the right window. Pick whatever files need to be backed up. (This was the step that stymied me last time, for reasons I can’t remember.)
Then, drag Create Archive from the same list. Rename it something that makes sense (instead of “archive”).
Drag Rename Finder Items over from the list. I added underscores for separators from the pulldown lists.
Drag Move Finder Items over from the list, and navigate to the place you want the final zipped file to live.
Note: I’m using Mail.app for my email, so there are prewritten Automator actions that ship with this program. If you’re using some other email client, this may not work for you.
Now, drag Launch Application over from the list. Select Mail.app from the pulldown list. In the gray action title bar, click the Files/Folders arrow and select Ignore Results From previous Action (otherwise you will email the documents to yourself).
From the Mail.app actions on the left, drag New Mail Message over, and fill out the appropriate information. (I wrote a short email that notified me of a successful backup.)
Finally, drag Send Outgoing Messages over to the right.
When all this is done, go to File -> Save As and name the action. Be sure to save it as an application. Test it out and see if it works. Make sure it doesn’t move your files from one place to another as opposed to copying them. I had issues when I used the Copy Finder Items action, where it simply moved the files instead of duplicating them, which meant I lost my email for about five minutes.
Now, to set it up as a recurring event, go to iCal and click on a date sometime in the future. Name it whatever you like. In the Alarm section, choose Open File. Directly under that pulldown, choose Other… and navigate to the Automator application you just saved. Once that is selected, you should be done.
And there you have it. An automated application that will back up a folder(s)/file(s) and send confirmation email on a specified date. I could add multiple things to this archive, set it up to compare two folders, write a log file, or a number of other scripted functions, but this works for the present day.
Coming up: An Automator 2.0/10.5 workflow to automatically mount an FTP server, compare two directories, and back up the local version. Handy for people who have multiple websites, like me.
Visiting Jen’s father this weekend in the LP City, I played hooky for a few hours and brought the big camera over to the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum to shoot some planes.
The museum is a curious collection of donations, acquisitions and working machinery, and they have a remarkable collection of hardware parked outside spanning fifty years of aviation history. I am always drawn to older designs, so I spent hours skulking around the oldtimers in the group, trying to find good angles and interesting subject matter. Ducking inside for what I thought would be a quick review of the exhibits, I was shanghaied by a friendly, garrulous older guide who showed me every nut, bolt, and rivet of the exhibits inside on an hourlong personal tour.
Back at the house, I pulled the last of the shelving down in the corner, exposing a pencilled note from the original workmen. The room was, as far as I can tell, finished out in 98° heat, on July 12 19(28?)
Then, I pounded all the nails out of the debris on the floor of the exam room and stacked it neatly in the garage for disposal. Tomorrow I’m going to swap filters in my aspirator and start pulling drywall and molding from the walls to see what’s underneath.
So here’s the basic idea for the remodeling. We’re going to do a phased approach so that the exam room is completed first, and then start work on the old offices so that the front porch space becomes one large office for our businesses. This way we can use that space effectively and reclaim one of the bedrooms upstairs, and we’ll add about 300sq. feet of usable, centrally heated space to the floorplan.
The bathroom downstairs will get reorganized so the toilet faces outward and the doorway opens out into a passthrough, as opposed to the bathroom being the passthrough. While we’re remodeling this part, I’m going to have a new chase and water lines run from that stack up through the wall to the atrium directly above, in preparation for conversion of that room into a master bath/dressing room.
Simple, right?
(shudders)
A few weeks ago, I started demoing the shelves in the old doctor’s office, but several other things got in the way of finishing the job. Today the weather outside was shite so I took advantage of a free afternoon to continue working. In order to get anything done properly, I had to first move all the crap out of that room and reorganize it out on the front porch, which began with humping two steel flat files from one side of the house to the other. Then I busted out the socket set and started disassembling the exam table, which will eventually go out in the garage until we can get rid of it.
Once the room was cleared of most of the furniture, I finished pulling up the rest of the floor tile, which took about twenty minutes—most of the adhesive dried out long ago, so a nudge with a flat screwdriver was about all it needed. Then, half an hour with a good flat crowbar was all it took to get the rest of the shelves down.
We’ve been wondering what’s behind the drop ceiling and how bad the plaster looked, and now we know. The roofing problems that at one time afflicted the atrium above leaked down to the ceiling below, so there’s some staining evident. The men who hung the drywall were obviously drunk and in a hurry, because there’s little or no finishing work done anywhere. It’s looking like all of the drywall needs to come down, which is fine, because the whole room needs to get reinsulated anyway. And once the interior sheathing is down, it will be easier to cut holes out for new windows.
Did you feel the earth swivel on its axis last night at about 11:30 EST? Did plates fly out of the cupboards and crash on the ground? Did you feel a sense of unease at any time last night while you laid in bed watching Leno?
Well, that was me, sorry. See, I failed math in the 11th grade. Miserably. I never paid attention in class, so any math concepts I picked up on were purely by chance, not due to the shining success of the American public school system. I thought I was safe when I went off to an art school for my undergraduate degree, but I should have known better than to try an escape. In a career that’s seen a few shifts in direction, eventually settling into web design, I’ve found that my lack of math skills is an anchor preventing me from doing a lot of things that might make me more money.
At the library yesterday, I found a book called Algebra Demystified which had a good mixture of explanation to examples, and cracked it open last night before going to bed. Starting out with fractions, I made it through to page 15 or so before turning the light off, remembering some things and relearning some others. The goal is to get through most of the book before I have to return it (a total of about four weeks). It’s 422 pages, which means I’ve got to crank through fifteen pages a night—last night that took about half an hour, which sounds just about right.
Looking for replacement parts for my bass guitar, I found an online machine shop which offers a Windows-based drafting application and free quoting service. A friend tells me it’s not cheap, but I’m going to at least get a quote.
It’s been quiet around here lately, so I’m going through the archives to pull out some pictures from years past to share. This is a pretty Ninety-Eight Holiday Jen and I spotted in Oella a few years ago with beautiful chrome styling and a two-tone paint job.
From Waxy.org, this is a singapore-based website suffering from horrendous design but containing a wealth of interesting bootleg recordings, from old Zeppelin to this year’s Police tour. I came for the Steely Dan outtakes, and stayed for the Jeff Buckley.
I obviously wasn’t cool enough in 1991 to have appreciated My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless when it first came out, but I’m playing “Sometimes” over and over again this morning.
I went back for another day with the Scout last Sunday. The guys who run the yard it’s stored in fired up the old Reo wrecker in the lot to move some equipment around, and I spied one shiny hubcap left on an ancient split-rim tire. I’d guess these are about as rare as hubcaps get, so I took a minute to get close and snap a picture.