Automated Backups with Transmit

Posted Mar 2, 02:24 pm in Tips & Tricks

Continuing the Transmit theme here, wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow combine Transmit’s awesome synchronization feature with some kind of scheduling to automate daily or weekly back-ups from your Mac to your Strongspace account?

It’s actually really easy.

Preparation

I’ve decided I’d like to automatically back-up my Address Book data (<sub>/Library/AddressBook/) weekly to Strongspace. First, I’ll go and make a new directory on my Strongspace account called backups, and another directory inside that called AddressBook. My Strongspace account is “demo”, so the full path to this new directory is /home/demo/backups/AddressBook/.

Hello Automator

I launch Automator.app, scroll down the left column (Library) to find and select Transmit, grab the “Synchronize Files” action from the middle column (Actions) and drag it over to the workflow area on the right.

Here’s a screen grab for those of you playing along at home:

the Automator window

Most of this is just SFTP connection settings, so let’s bang in the usual stuff. You’ll need to replace “demo” with your own username/subdomain, of course.

the Automator sync settings

Most of these settings are self explanatory, but the interesting ones are:

  • Sync Direction: I want to upload my local files to Strongspace
  • Sync Method: I want Strongspace to be an exact mirror of my local directory (Transmit also provides an option where it will only upload new/changed files without deleting files that no longer exist locally)
  • Local Path: I selected “Other…” from the drop-down, then navigated to </sub>/Library/Application Support/AddressBook
  • Remote path: The full path on the Strongspace server, so that’s /home/demo/backups/AddressBook/
  • Transmit has a handy (but slightly slower) way of automatically detecting the difference between your local time and the server time (it uploads a temporary file and compares the difference). If you want to speed things up a little by fiddling with offsets, go for it, but I’d rather keep things simple.

Next I run a test to see if things work. I hit the play button near the top right corner of the Automator window, watch Transmit open up, connect to Strongspace, change to the correct directory, change the local path to the correct directory, then start uploading the Address Book files. Once it’s done, it disconnects and closes Transmit. Perfect!

I save this Automater script to my Desktop (or wherever you like) choosing the “Application” file format, saving the file as AddressBookBackup.app This creates a clickable application on my desktop that will launch the back-up whenever I like.

As a test, I modify a contact in my Address Book (hence modifying the files), and run the back-up again, and smile — this time, only the modified files are uploaded to Strongspace.

We’re almost there.

Scheduling

Let’s say I want to schedule AddressBookBackup.app to run automatically every Friday morning.

I open up iCal (yes, iCal!), and for the sake of clarity, I create a new calendar (File > New Calendar) called “Scheduled Tasks”. I create a new event for this coming Friday “Address Book Backup” with the following details:

  • scheduled for 11am
  • set to repeat weekly (ending “Never”)
  • an alarm that opens AddressBookBackup.app 0 minutes before the event

Here’s a screen shot of the event:

the iCal event settings

Every Friday at 11am (a time my computer is usually on, and I’m probably looking for a second cup of coffee) iCal will trigger the backup, making sure the files on Strongspace match those on my local disk.

But wait, there’s more!

  • This will work if iCal or Transmit are already open or closed, which is nice.
  • You can drag in multiple “Synchronize Files” actions to one Automator workflow, so you can bundle all your weekly back-ups of different folders into one script and one iCal event, then make another one for daily or monthly tasks.
  • It’s an Automator workflow, so you can do all kinds of stuff – ask for a confirmation before running, tell it to send you an email afterwards, run an AppleScript, open your Strongspace account in Safari, etc etc.

Downsides?

The only thing that feels a little strange is that when iCal triggers the event, the current application I was working in loses focus, switching to AddressBookBackup.app. Frustrating, but a small price to pay.

With Thanks

I’m not sure I would have ever thought of combining Transmit, Automator and iCal like this – the credit goes to Leslie Pozdena and Tim Coulter at Panic Software and their speedy reply to my questions.