SuperDuper Scheduling/cron failures

[diamondsw]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Having a new facility that does the same kind of thing cron does doesn't deprecate cron. As I said, there is nothing in cron's man pages that indicates cron is deprecated, and there's no such thing as 'implicit deprecation': something is either deprecated or it isn't. And, in this case, it isn't.

Just one example from Apple:

Timed Jobs Using cron
The cron daemon is the most common tool for executing a job at a particular time. Although all versions of Mac OS X support cron jobs, beginning in v10.4, the functionality of cron is largely superseded by launchd, and all periodic jobs built into Mac OS X are launchd jobs.
...
Because installing cron jobs requires modifying a shared resource (the crontab file), you should not programmatically add a cron job.
...
Timed Jobs Using launchd
Beginning in Mac OS X v10.4, the preferred way to add a timed job is to use a launchd timed job. A launchd timed job is similar to a cron job, with two key differences: ...

So no, not deprecated. But not for programmatic use, and heavily discouraged. There's a whole lot that falls under "you really shouldn't do this, but we're not going to force you to stop". If you weren't already using launchd elsewhere I could understand the reluctance to switch over - it would be something significant to write, unfamiliar, etc. But it's not - it's already used and well-understood for the backup-on-mount functionality.

The only reason I harp on this is because of what a pain it was trying to track down what was happening when SuperDuper left a spurious entry in the crontab. I wouldn't have spent hours trying to track this error down if it had used the same system as everything else.

I promise I won't post back after this, as it's likely for naught and quite likely just getting annoying. In the meantime, I'll delete all of my scheduled jobs from SuperDuper and use the syntax from the crontab to recreate them as launchd items. Then I won't have to worry about bugs in SuperDuper and I'll be able to easily manage the backup process.