Mason Sklut

With the new release of Mac OS X Leopard, over 300 new features have been installed on your Mac. The most talked-about one would be Time Machine by far. Apple include Time Machine, because it will encourage people to backup their files on a more frequent basis. The only feature with Time Machine that bugs me, is that you can set a time to backup, it’s only by the hour. With a little bit of code, Automator, and iCal, I got Time Machine to work when I want it to.

1. To start off, open up Automator
2. Select “Custom” in the drop-down menu that appears upon opening Automator
3. Find “Utilities” in the sidebar and then drag “Run AppleScript” to the blank space on the right side
4. Where it says “(* Your script goes here *)”, copy and paste the following code:
   do shell script  /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper
>/dev/null 2>&1 &
5. Go to the File menu in the menubar, and choose “Save as Plug-in”
6. Type in a name for the plug-in
7. Choose “iCal Alarm” under the drop-down menu below the title field.
8. After clicking the “Save” button, iCal will open up
9. Switch to iCal, and double click on the application title you just made. It should appear on the day you made it
10. Click on the edit button to change the settings
11. In order for this script to work properly, you must have your hard-drive connected to your Mac at the time the plug-in runs
12. A trick to remind me to turn my hard-drive on is to add another alarm with the event that makes a pop-up message with sound
13. I have my alarm set up so the pop-up message reminds me to turn my hard-drive on, then 2 minutes later the script will run and backup all my data

screenshots: 1 2 3 4 5 6-7 9-9_1 12