Automator 确实是一个非常棒的软件：你可以用它生成各种各样的自动化脚本，而且相对非常简单。我日益感觉到备份是非常重要的，特别是开始进行科研之后，研究获取的一些数据和自己写的文件，都非常重要而且应该经常备份。
我们可以有很多备份的方法：拷贝到ZIP盘，烧录到光盘，网络服务器，外接硬盘。但是这些方法都需要用户自己记得定期进行。如果用户忘记进行备份，结果可能就会很悲惨了。
接下来的自动化处理过程使用英文描述：
- First of all you need Upload to FTP for Automator. We will use this action to upload file. Download and install it.
- Open automator and let’s start adding actions. First action is Finder>Get specific Finder Items. You can then add the folder you need to backup regularly.
- Finder>Create Archive. Save as: file name you want, and where: you want to save the archive temprarily. Say desktop.
- Finder>Rename Finder Items. We can choose to add Date or Time to the archive we just made. We might always need to add the date of the archive so we know when is this backup made.
- Then we can use the Upload to FTP from Terminal>Upload to FTP. Basicly you enter the server address, user name and password, then the path to the backup folder/location.
- After that we want to move the archive we made to trash. Finder>Find Finder Items. We can find the file from Desktop, and with name contains maybe “backup”, according to how you name your backup archive. To prevent moving some other files into the trash we could also add that we want the extension “is equal to” “zip”.
- Then Finder>Move to trash
- Done!
So isn’t it amazing? Actually if you want to use it as iCal alarm so it can run at certain time every day or week or month, “Save as Plugin” in the Automator for iCal alarm. It will start iCal and you can define when you want this run.
What’s more, because Automator is quite flexible, you can do other backup besides upload to FTP. I upload to FTP because I have a websever with quite a big space, and upload to FTP can be done all by the computer itself as long as it is running and connected to the internet. You can also do it by copying the backup to your external hard drive. Just connect your drive, create the workflow by replacing Upload to FTP to move/copy the archive to a specific location in your external hard drive and you are all done. Every time you want to backup, just plug your external hard drive in and simply run the workflow.
Automator is an amazing thing. It doesn’t make you feel so unless you need to do something tedious. And some of the things that you didn’t believe you can do, you can simply do it with Automator. Right now, such easy to use yet powerful automatic tool is only available to Mac OS X 10.4 users. NO Windows and we cannot see this even coming into Vista. And maybe you can do something similar in Windows by buying some third party softwares. But you can definitely do it yourself for free in Mac OS X Tiger (and above).