automator for daily smart backup

This is way beyond Automator's built-in features.

Automator is great at running linear tasks.

It is terrible at running tasks that are repetitive, or that require any logic checks (e.g. if/then...)

You might be able to craft an AppleScript or shell script to do the task, and incorporate that into a workflow, but then you might as well go straight to the source.

However, there are any number of backup apps that can do this. MacOS already comes with Time Machine that can do this (and more, in terms of file versioning and snapshots). I'm not sure it's worth reinventing that wheel.

As noted above, Time Machine comes with your Mac and is specifically designed to do your backups. Yes, it only backs up changed files after doing the initial system backup. You schedule when they are backed up. This said, there appears to be one issue with Time Machine. Apparently is too longer backs up your email messages. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my Mac and my wife's Mac and it backs up everything. It also has some valuable additional features that Time Machine does not have. If I go into the external disk where my backups are stored, it mirrors the computer, providing a current available copy of everything. And it's easy to use.

One thing I did not make clear is that Carbon Copy Cloner can be used on several computers in the same family for the one purchase price. It couldn't be easier to set up and use. I have found that when it does its daily backup as scheduled. it only takes a couple of minutes. I choose to have two backup external disks. The other one is backed up by me manually whenever I add a new file or change one. I just drag over the file to replace the old one. This way I am always backed up to the minute.

Moch ~ If you're willing to consider alternatives to Automator, then SuperDuper! features Smart Update.

õ¿õ¬

> the thunderbolt drive is 3Tb and I don’t want to add it to the time machine backup, I’m afraid it would make the backup very long and slow

The whole point of Time Machine is that it's designed to be transparent - turn it on and forget it, until you need it.

It is designed to run in the background, yielding to the frontmost app.

Additionally, after the first scan, it only records changes, so if much of your data is static, the Time Machine overhead would be minimal.

Carbon Copy Cloner has been one of those tools I paid for even if I only used it a handful of times between upgrades. It doesn’t work the same with the M1 chip but with the intel chip it saved me several times because when things went really wrong I had copies of my system I could actually lock the SD card from changes and look at the system to find what happened and how it happened. Plus I could drag the files needed off of the back ups. I used to have one copy I used only with the internet and social media to keep all the tracking things off of my system that had my real life on it. Now it does backups but doesn’t really work for a bootable copy or an external disk. It really is solid software though.