[lbackup-discussion] Fwd: Changing Time Machine Destinations Automatically for Home and Office

[henri]

Below is a quote from a thread on the Mac Enterprise Mailing list. I figured that this thread may be of interest to people on this list. 

Thread is available from : <http://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1003&L=macenterprise&T=0&F=&S=&P=394550>


>>> I've just been asked to automate the process of swapping TM backup destinations as a VIP moves between home and work.
>>> 
>>> FWIW, I know I can do this with several different tools and script triggers (cranker, Marco Polo, etc). The technical details aren't a problem for me at all. However, I don't have a lot of time to test a solution ( a day or two) and would appreciate it if someone had already been down that road to give me a pointer or two - as this works well, this doesn't...
>> 
>> I'm interested to know what you find & come up with, Dean.
>> There seem to be a few pages out there, between personal sites and macosxhints.com submissions.
>> 
>> I've been investigating -attempting- to script TimeMachine backups without much success. It's easy enough to use the GUI to set a destination, and then
>> invoke a backup (and parse the system.log for what feedback can be had). 
>> 
>> But I'd like to be able to set the Time Machine prefs according to the drive that's attached. 
>> Using "defaults" to set the key in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine
>> 
>> - by working with BackupAlias and/or DestinationVolumeUUID , while taking in the plist, doesn't show up in the GUI and
>> does not appear to be honored. Could be a matter of disconnect between SystemEvents when changing things behind the scenes, but it'd be 
>> nice not to have to (attempt) to do this via AppleScript and the System Pref pane...
> 
> Slightly off topic, but one possible approach is to use TimeMachine to backup to a second partition / sparse bundle, on the internal drive of the laptop. Once you have this setup, it would be possible to synchronize the internal (backup-drive / sparse bundle) to the pre-determined external drive(s) when they connected.
> 
> Although this approach introduces some additional complexity, it bypasses various problems, which have been previously mentioned relating to the configuration of TimeMachines backup destination drive.
> 
> Finally, if the TimeMachine destination is sparse bundle, you have the possibility of synchronizing the sparse bundle via the network. Perhaps this is a more attractive option than having to attach an external hard drive.
> 
> A script to synchronize sparse images via the network is available from the link below, It could be modified so that it synchronizes to a local disk if this is what you are after : <http://www.lbackup.org/synchronizing_disk_images_between_machines>


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