Finding Files by Date Modified

Use a "Run Shell Script" automator action with the following command: find ~/Documents -type f -ctime -7

The "-ctime" looks at change times, and the -7 says to look for changes less than 7 * 24 hours ago. The "-type f" limits it to regular files.

The output of that is a list of file paths that have changed.

You can look at the man page for find in the Terminal for more details and options.

HAL 9000

Activate the Finder. Press COMMAND-F to open the search window. Change the Last Opened button to Last Modified and set the Any Date button to This Week. Click on the Save button to save the search as a Smart Folder. The Smart Folder will automatically reflect all files in the Documents folder that were modified within the last week (you can set your own specific date requirements if you want.)

Backup doesn't allow you to choose files by Date Modified because that is partly how Backup automatically determines what new files require backing up. In fact that's how most backup programs work. If you use an incremental backup only files modified since the last backup are backed up. So in reality there's really no need to do what you propose.

If you want them in a folder, then Kappy's suggestion is probably better.

You can see the result of the shell command by putting the Automator action "View Results" after it. Once you are getting the list you want, you could use that list to drive the operation of Automator actions to do whatever you wanted with those files. This gives a lot of flixibility, but for your purpose, I'd probably do what Kappy said.

Are you moving the files out of the directory as a result of your process? Are you running any utilities against the files that might change their modification times?

The "find" command gets the same result on my computer no matter how many times I run it.

I don't know the backup tool you talk about, but Kappy mentioned that it uses modification times, so it might affect them. Perhaps it takes care of modificaton times itself, and all you need to do is to point it at the folder to be backed up.

My guess is that "[a folder for the files]" is not in your Documents folder. If that's the case, then they are no longer there to be found the next time you run it.

Would your needs be met if rather than moving them to that folder you made aliases in the folder?