macOS automate rsync in Lion..?

[soultruth]

Hi there, first time post and new to the forum. Hope this is in the right place - apologies if not!

I have a friend with an old iMac 2006 or 2007. Its running Lion. Cant update to anything newer.

He requires a backup but Time Machine is failing every time. We're using a new 1TB USB drive but it takes days then fails.

I've written a simple bash script to run rsync and copy all the folders he requires to the drive. This does work, but I need a way to automate it. It tried to use Automator but it doesn't like Lion.

Any advice would be very gratefully received.

Thanks!
Ray

 

[kryten2]

Info : https://developer.apple.com/library...bs.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/10000172i-CH1-SW2

 

[freiheit]

I concur. In this day, launchd seems to be the way to go. It can be somewhat daunting to get started with it, but there are good tutorials and examples online, and honestly if you're comfortable writing an rsync script you can handle launchd (speaking from experience here ).

 

[ocabj]

man crontab

 

[superscape]

man crontab

Cron will work, but is the old school way of doing things. Whilst it does still work and I don't know if it's officially deprecated, Apple seem to be encouraging everyone in the direction of launchd.

If you do decide to use Cron, despite this, then you might want to take a look at Cronnix which provides a GUI, making things a little easier: https://code.google.com/archive/p/cronnix/downloads

Seriously though, launchd is the way to go.

In case it's of some help, I've attached a copy of a launch daemon I use to do folder synching myself. It shouldn't be too hard to alter it to suit your purposes.