Amir’s Blog

Using “DSW” to Automatically Backup You Flash Drive

OS X.5 came with a cool new feature called Timemachine which automatically backs-up your internal Mac harddrive. People like me live off their flash drive, and losing it would mean disaster, and you can never remember to manually back it up. When I learned that Time Machine didn’t backup external drive I was disappointed. Enter “Do Something When.” A program that will execute a script, or application anytime we mount a new drive. Check the link below to get DSW

First you need to create the script to backup your drive. You can copy and paste this code into Script Editor and save it somewhere as MyScriptName.

do shell script "rsync -rt /Volumes/MyUSBDrive/
                         /Volumes/TMBackup/MyUSBDrive_Backup"
display dialog "Backup Complete"

Be sure to change MyUSBDrive and TMBackup to the name of your USB Drive and your Time Machine Backup drive.

Once DSW is installed, plug in your drive and tell it “When MyUSBDrive mounts run application My script name” Then tell it to start DSW automatically when the computer turns on.

You’re done. Now everytime you plug in you USB drive you will have it backed up on your Time Machine Backup

Some of my friends have said that backing up large flash drive can cause lag on their system, and would rather be prompted to back up then automatically backing up. In order to do this use this script instead of the one above:

display dialog "Backup your flash drive?" buttons {"Yes", "No"} default button 2
if the button returned of the result is "Yes" then
    do shell script "rsync -rt /Volumes/MyUSBDrive/
                         /Volumes/TMBackup/MyUSBDrive_Backup"
    display dialog "Backup Complete" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
else
    display dialog "Backup Canceled" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
end if

Remember to save the script as an application in order for DSW to be able to run it.
>Get DSW <