applescripts for Time Machine

Question

Level 2

290 points

applescripts for Time Machine

My only Mac is a Powerbook. Time Machine is an integral part of my backup strategy. I do manual backups once or twice a day. How difficult is it to create a script that will do an immediate Time Machine backup? Is Time Machine scriptable?

Powerbook G4 12-inch (PPC) 1.25GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.5.1), iPhone - shuffle

Posted on Dec 7, 2007 7:29 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Jason Kacmarski

Level 4

1,980 points

Dec 9, 2007 5:05 PM in response to Curtis Tucker

There's no AppleScript dictionary for Time Machine so while it maybe AppleScriptable, it's not documented. There is a shell script that can be called from AppleScript that will start a backup. I found it online:

do shell script "/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper >/dev/null 2>&1 &"

That will start a backup immediately. Hope this helps.

Reply

Answer 2

Curtis Tucker Author

Level 2

290 points

Dec 9, 2007 6:59 PM in response to Curtis Tucker

That's very helpful. Thanks.

Reply

Answer 3

Asu

Level 1

93 points

Dec 28, 2007 12:58 AM in response to Curtis Tucker

How to do an immediate Time Machine backup?

Click on the TM icon in the dock, wait until the little menu pops us, there it is, a menu item called Back Up Now.

Reply