On or near 4/22/04 5:40 PM, Sonja Ray at [EMAIL PROTECTED] observed:
>> From: henryn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Reply-To: "Entourage:mac Talk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 16:44:41 -0700
>> To: "Entourage:mac Talk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Subject: Re: Scripted backup of DB
>> But I've been thinking about doing better more and more lately, and trying
>> to figure all the angles. Setting up a cron task seems to be a quite
>> reasonable approach -- though it isn't very practical for my
>> technically-averse colleagues. (Is there a higher-level way of creating a
>> periodic task, say, with AppleScript?)
>>
>> One niggle with this method is that it requires the machine be left on, or
>> at least not sleeping. Here in earthquake and power-shortage country (U.S.
>> left coast) it _seems_ better to sleep the machine when possible.
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> One more issue: You don't seem to be quitting Entourage to do this backup.
>> Maybe you quit each night? If not... Seems to me I've had past trouble with
>> file locks preventing MUD read access while the app is open, but I could be
>> wrong. In my office, running at 5:30 am would certainly guarantee no user
>> intervention issues, but what about incoming email? No problem for dial-up,
>> but for users with DSL or cable modems, there might be a problem with a
>> collision between incoming messages and backup processes.
>
>> Henry
>
>
> There might be an AppleScript way to do the same thing; there probably is.
> But oddly enough, I'm more familiar with cron, so it was the easier way for
> me.
>
> And no, I don't leave the machine on. With the reintroduction of scheduled
> startups in Panther, I have my machine set to start itself up in the
> morning. Since I don't have Entourage set as a startup item, it's not
> running then, so no problem there. And the database daemon, which IS a
> startup item, doesn't cause any problems as long as it doesn't need to
> access the database during the copy.
>
> I'm sure it's not the best or most elegant way to ensure there's always a
> good MUD backup, but it works for me.
>
If one didn't want to shut down the machine, it would be fairly easy to
write two simple AppleSCripts:
tell application "Microsoft Entourage" to quit
And
tell application "Microsoft Entourage" to activate [or "to launch"]
Put those into cron with an "osascript" command to run the scripts, running
the quit script a minute before your ditto script, and running the
activation script after a reasonable interval to allow the copy to complete.
When I duplicate my MUD folder in Finder it rarely takes over 2 minutes, but
then, I keep my database trimmed down to about 5000 messages. Larger
databases would need a longer time to complete the copy.
Example:
osascript -e 'tell application "Microsoft Entourage" to activate'
osascript -e 'tell application "Microsoft Entourage" to quit'
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