
Automator is one of them, offering a simple way to automate repetitive tasks without any third-party software. For all the old jokes about one-button mice and simplicity, Macs have some power-user features Windows just doesn’t offer. Now with Shortcuts on macOS Monterey this might be even easier, not sure I haven’t tried it yet. Automator is one of them, offering a simple way to automate repetitive tasks without any third-party software. I don’t know, it’s a way to do things, but not something you want for the long term.

Setting “Ignore alerts” on the specific calendar didn’t work as the file that makes the backup was not called (which makes sense, since it’s set up as an alert).
#Automate backups with automator mac mac#
The only problem with this is that now the Mac will alert me with those events. Then I then set that whole calendar to be hidden to avoid cluttering my normal calendar view: I added it to a Automations calendar so I know where all may automations are, and I also know where to disable them. Then I opened the calendar and in alert I set it to open this file. I use it all the time, to do little things like changing image formats and sizes.Īnd I set it up like this, to get the file I wanted to back up, copy it to a backups folder, and add the date and time: Probably the most under appreciated app on the Mac. So the first thing I thought was Automator. Not worth setting up a while cron and bash script automation
#Automate backups with automator mac free#
I did this manually for some time but I also wanted to make this automatic to free my mind, and I wanted to avoid using cron jobs and shell scripts which I then tend to forget, and this was just a temporary thing after all, only for a couple weeks.


So to back it up, you simply copy the file to a backup folder and that’s it. It’s not “somewhere on your computer” or “somewhere on a server” but you’re not really sure how. You’ll see a variety of different document types you can start with. You could also find it under Other > Automator in Launchpad or Applications > Automator in the Finder. SQLite is great because it’s just a file. Automator is installed on your Mac by default, so you can launch it by pressing Command+Space to open Spotlight search, typing Automator, and pressing Enter. I was storing data in a SQLite database and I want to back it up once a day, while I’m working on it locally during development. While working on my new website, I had a simple need.
