Macs aren’t just cute
Here I am back on my mac soapbox…
I was looking recently for a reliable way to backup my computer, and came across this article, which seemed like the perfect fit. It’s geeky, it’s solid and simple, and it makes use of the power of the Mac OS X’s *nix underlying framework in a powerful way…at least until you get to Page 2. There, it goes from a nice, geeky CLI “rsync” command to using AppleScript and iCal to run it daily. Now, AppleScript and iCal are great apps, and both have their uses, but has this guy ever heard of “cron”?
Cron is one of the most powerful and awesome things that a *nix system has. I don’t know a whole lot about it’s inner workings, but I know that creating a crontab with this script would be ideal. It would run completely in the background and be perfectly reliable, instead of requiring a lightweight Apple program to run an Applescript just to run a CLI command.
It seems these guys are just musicians who happen to be Apple fans, so I guess I’ll cut them some slack, but I’d really like to hear from someone who knows a little more about Cron, so I’ve got the chance to take the great CLI instructions given here, and rewrite page 2 into a detailed set of instructions for setting up a crontab. Anyone? If not, I’ll learn Cron myself just to write the instructions. Help!
Hey Brad
I choose to write the tutorial using ical instead of cron because of the level of technical savvy in our readership. The tutorial is written to be accessible by someone who has never cracked open the terminal before, and I just couldn’t see making use vi or pico, navigating the quirks of cron on osx.
Aside from that, there are some real advantages to running scripts from ical instead of cron. For example, I can look at my workload schedule for the day and quickly move a backup script an hour later.
If you work up a good entry-level tutorial using cron to implement the backup, shoot me an email, and I’ll link over to it.
cheers.
By the way … just musicians? Dude, low blow.
Comment by michael lee — April 3, 2007 @ 8:32 pm
Michael,
Hey man, thanks for taking the time to read and respond. I definitely see what you’re getting at in keeping it simple by using the tools you did. To be honest, I pretty much write the blog with the assumption that no one but me reads it, so I tend to write very unfiltered reactions to what I see, just for me to go back and review my thoughts later. I don’t think I’ve got any real “readers”, per se, but I always forget about trackbacks. Regardless, apologies if I came off like I was writing from some geeky high horse, especially when I don’t know much of anything about cron myself. I’m a fairly recent Mac convert from Windows by way of Linux, so I’m really wanting to delve into the inner workings of the system and learn as I go, and sometimes my eagerness gets the better of me. if you know of a good Cron tutorial for OSX, please pass it along. I’d love to try to soak it up, as everything I googled up was Linux-centered, and didn’t address the “quirks of cron on osx”, as you put it.
Oh, and “just musicians” wasn’t meant as a cut at all. I have no realized artistic talent whatsoever, and so have lots of respect for those that do, in any form or fashion. I just meant that you weren’t a pro coder, just a hobbyist/enthusiast like me (at least as far as I can tell).
Comment by zoocat — April 3, 2007 @ 8:53 pm