From Away

After spending a couple of weeks using Mac OSX Tiger I can honestly say that Apple has definitely made a huge improvement on the operating system; both in speed and the quality of its applications and features.

Since I first installed Tiger on my 1GHz. 15” Powerbook (512MB RAM), I’ve been nothing but impressed by Tiger. I’ve been using my Powerbook both for casual purposes (checking personal email, organizing photos in iPhoto, surfing the web) as well as for professional purposes (web development/graphic design) and I can honestly say that my efficiency has risen in both aspects. The new features that Apple has made available in this release have been a godsend. Over the next few weeks, I plan to comment on some of the aspects of the operating system and how they’ve changed either for the better, or for the worse.

Automator

This little gem I can definitely see coming in very handy for me, as it already has in a couple of cases. One use that really stands out in my mind for Automator is its possible uses as a backup tool. I plan to at some point explore the possibility of setting up a workflow that will fetch MySQL backups from my webserver and save them to a network backup drive. Hopefully I’ll be able to set up a workflow to also grab a copy of my home directory as well.

Another use I’ve already found for Automator is to serve as a local backup tool. I have a workflow set up that will mount a network volume for me copy and some folders over to the network drive. This has worked flawlessly, but I’ve hit a couple of walls in the process that I can’t seem to find solutions to. First of all, when the workflow is complete, I’d like for it to disconnect from the network drive. So far, I’ve not found anyway to do this with Automator’s built-in actions. Secondly, when I copy files to the network drive, I’d like only updated files to be copied (incremental backup). I’ve only been able to “Replace Existing Files”, which is fine for now, but it means about a 3 to 4 GB transfer of files over my network on a nightly basis.

As I begin to brush up on some AppleScript, I think the possibilities for this tool will be endless. Does anyone else have any workflows they’ve put together that they’d like to share? Also, if anyone knows of a way to disconnect from a network drive using Automator, or how to only replace updated files during a Finder copy, please drop me a line, or leave a comment.

Some Handy Links

Below are some handy Automator links that I have been collecting over the last couple of weeks:

• Download Workflows at Automator World


• Automator World Forums


• Write Your Own Automator Workflows at Mac Dev Center


• Fraser Spiers’ Flickr Automator Workflow

Next Up

Next time I’ll be looking at Dashboard.