Automator Folder Action: Move Finder Items to Time Capsule

Question

Level 1

22 points

Automator Folder Action: Move Finder Items to Time Capsule

I have home security software that saves a movie file to a local folder each night. Since these files are big, I would like to move any movie file in the folder that is older than 3 days to my Time Capsule.

This seems like a perfect job for Automator. Couple of problems:
- "Find Finder Items" action is searching in local folder for movie files older than 3 days, "Date last modified" that "is not in the last" "3" days returns files that have a modification date of "Today". It should only return files older than 3 days.
- "Move Finder Items" to folder on the Time Capsule says that it can't find the folder. I am first using action to "Get Specified Servers" to force the Time Capsule to be mounted, but it still can't seem to find the folder.

Any tips or examples of doing this type of thing are appreciated.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.2), Automator 2.1, Time Capsule 2.1

Posted on Jan 22, 2010 8:11 AM

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Answer 1

InterLingo Author

Level 1

22 points

Jan 27, 2010 4:31 PM in response to InterLingo

I've been playing around with this, and it appears that the "Find Finder Items" action isn't very reliable. I was able to pull the correct files using "Run Shell Script" with the command:

find /Users/username/Documents/folder/* -name "*.mov" -type f -mtime +3

Move with another shell command, or pass the arguments from this to the "Move Finder Items" action. A third-party app that gets around the quirkiness of the Finder actions and Folder actions is called Hazel.

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Answer 2

InterLingo Author

Level 1

22 points

Feb 1, 2010 4:08 PM in response to InterLingo

What finally worked for me was a Folder Action with the following items:

1) "Get Specified Servers" action with connection to my time capsule: "smb://user:password@192.168.1.x:445/Volumes/volume-name/folder"
2) "Run Shell Script" action with command posted in this thread
3) "Move Finder Items" with time capsule director. You can also do this move with another shell command.

If the folder action is not triggering when new files are added, then reboot. My folder action was very flakey until rebooting. The shell command work well, but Apple needs to invest a bit more in their Action Library.

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

238,991 points

Feb 1, 2010 4:34 PM in response to InterLingo

Good work, thanks for the report! 🙂

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