Time Machine - auto backup and eject

Well Time Machine will automatically run when the hard drive is plugged in. So that's taken care of. Just show her how to drag the little icon to the trash, to save yourself making the script.
 
carderne said:
I've just set up Time Machine on my mom's Macbook and I'm trying to make it as painlessly easy as possible for her.

I think this is possible, but I haven't used Macs enough before to have the scripting know-how to do it. I want to set it up so that Time Machine automatically runs a backup when the external hard drive is plugged in and then automatically ejects the drive when the backup is finished.

That way she can just plug in the drive, forget about it, and then unplug when the icons disappear from the desktop...

Thanks
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Kind of defeats the purpose of time machine. Use superduper instead.
 
What's awesome about Superduper is the backups are fully bootable. If the hard drive conks out you just boot off your backup external and away you go. You do have to backup regularly though.
 
carderne said:
Why's that? Because of the hourly and daily 'copies' going back? She's still going to do it every few days, so it will still work quite nicely for that purpose. Unless you meant something else? I'll have a look at SuperDuper, but I think the user-friendliness of Time Machine is gonna suit my mom quite well.
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Time machine is designed for continuous incremental background backups and it does it brilliantly. Time machine via wifi is also a possibility, then she wouldnt have to worry about the external drive at all. :)

SuperDuper is also very easy to use and scriptable.
 
Time Machine will back up every hour by default, but will also write any backups as soon as you make any changes. Running a little program is more effort than just plugging it in, whenever you're at home and ejecting whenever you wanna be portable again.
 
I've tried Time machine over wifi and performance was quite crap. However they may have improved it with Snow Leopard etc.
 
Why doesn't she just keep the drive permanently plugged into the Macbook?? She only needs to unplug it when she moves the Macbook away from the drive...
 
When still used a Macbook I used to plug my hard drive in whenever I used my Macbook at my desk at home - is a bit of a schlep but you get used to it (and feel "safer" knowing you have recent backups). Now that I use an iMac my hard drive is a permanent fixture ;) And also use fire wire now so all my USB ports are available :)
 
Synaesthesia said:
I've tried Time machine over wifi and performance was quite crap. However they may have improved it with Snow Leopard etc.
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It depends on what you're doing. If you creating large files on a regular basis (video, photography, music, etc) then it is a real schlep but for regular use (word processing, spreadsheets, mail, etc) it's pretty good. It's a good idea to do that first backup over ethernet though :D
 
Right, I think I was measuring it for the first sync, which just never seemed to finish. It seems like a good idea, come to think of it I get decent network speeds on our Wifi network at home.
 
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