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Old 02-18-2005, 03:01 PM
kbradnam kbradnam is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Davis, CA
Posts: 25
Problems automating backups with applescript and crontab

Another day, another question :-)

Ok, so now I'm confortable backing up data to our (newly arrived) external drives, my next challenge was to automate the whole thing.

I've taken the example Daily Backup script, made suitable adjustments to the name so that it loads the correct set of saved settings. I've set up my crontab file so that it runs correctly at the desired time.

The problem is as follows. Whilst I will be backing up daily to our external firewire drive, I will also be backing up weekly to a pocket firewire drive which I will keep off site (in case of fire/theft of our main server and the local backup drive).

So even though the pocket firewire drive is no longer around (I took it home yesterday), SuperDuper! seems to remember that it once existed and that it contained a destination backup volume.

When SuperDuper! launches (via the crontab applescript) it pops up an error 'Cannot find target volume ....". Everything then just waits until the 'Cancel' button is clicked in the error window. Effectively this means that I can't automate the backups at the moment unless the pocket firewire drive is plugged in.

I've looked in the com.blacey.SuperDuper!.plist file to see if the list of 'remembered' backup volumes was there (thinking that I could just delete the relevant entry for now), but I can't find it.

I also tried removing the SuperDuper Cache directory but it still insists on trying to find the pocket wirewire drive.

Any ideas? I guess the other thing would be if AppleScript can 'click' the cancel button for you (I've never programmed in AppleScript before).

Regards,

Keith
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