Less than a week and my backup solution failed. Something got corrupted with File Synchronization so it kept quitting with an error 11 whenever it tried to synch two particular folders. I couldn't delete the prefs and retry to recreate the sync sets because it quit as soon as I tried to add one of the folders. It was back to square one and time to look for another backup solution.

I still don't want to use Retrospect Express, because it doesn't do hard drive to hard drive backups, as far as I can tell from their web site. There is also Synchronize It!, but if I'm going to spend that much for shareware I might as well buy a real program. Other solutions looked even less professional and more ad hoc. But what I finally settled on as an interim solution is to use SimpleBackup.

It's not a complicated program. What it does is read an aliases in its starting folder, then back up those files to another folder that you specify. It copies files if there is any difference, one way copy, and doesn't delete deleted files. It's relatively quick, even over a network, but it takes over the CPU while it's doing its thing. Another limitation is that you can't backup to the root folder of a volume, you have to choose a folder. But even with those few limitations it can be wrangled into a solution.

The way I've set it up is to have 4 backup stages. Each with a set of aliases in its own folder. Stage 1 backups up program preference files from the system folder into a backup folder. Stage 2 backs up the FTP directory. Stage 3 backs up my personal folder, except for the web files. Stage 4 backs up all of the web files.

So I've modified my script to run each program. Before stage 4 the script tells NetPresenze and its acgi program to quit on the remote machine, that way stage 4 won't get a file busy error. After the stage 4 backup is done the script restarts NetPresenze and the acgi program. I also improved the previous version by upping the AppleScript timeouts to up to an hour, since the network backups could take a while if there are a lot of new big files.

One of the new features of Applescript 1.4, included in OS 9, is the ability to execute remote commands. The first step is to define the remote application:

Then it's a simple matter to invoke the remote application to run a command:

Note that I used terms from Finder to quit NetPresenze. Apparently that works so long as the Finder has the commands defined. Note that the application has to be running, otherwise the tell command fails. The neat thing is that with Keychains (also in OS 9), the script will use the keychain to connect to the remote machine. The first time that the script is run it'll ask you for the user name and password to use, then after that it'll use the password stored in the Keychain.

Another cool thing is that you don't have to specify a password with the mount command in Applescript (and I assume other network commands). Just specify the username and the script will use the keychain to retrieve the password. Makes it easier to change your password in one place.