Dropbox is a wonderful little program. What it does is put a folder on your computer, and anything you place inside of that folder will be backed up to the internet. I shouldn’t need to convince you that keeping an off-computer backup of all your project files is a good idea.
Unfortunately, you have to manually put anything you want backed up in your Dropbox folder, and that’s lame, especially if you have multiple folders that you want to be constantly backed up. The good news? It’s 2009, robots are about to control the world, and we can automate it!
This tutorial will show you how to use Dropbox and Automator to do automatic backups of multiple folders.
Get Dropbox
Obviously, if you haven’t already, you’re going to need to get Dropbox and install it.
Create Action
Now you’ll have to create an Automator action so your syncing will be automated.
- Load up Automator (It should be in your Applications folder)and create a Custom Workflow
- In the Files & Folders tab, find “Get Specified Finder Items” and drag it to your workflow. Choose the first folder you’d like sync’d.
- Now drag “Copy Finder Items” to your workflow.
- Choose your Dropbox folder as the destination, and click “Replacing existing files” if you so desire.
- Keep doing this for all of the folders you want to keep sync’d with Dropbox.
- Save your Workflow.
- Right click on the action you’ve saved, and go to “Open With”. Navigate to System/Library/Core Services and choose to “Always Open With” Automator Runner. This makes it so when your action is opened it automatically runs.
Sync
Now, already we’ve made syncing multiple folders with Dropbox easier, as you can just run the action you’ve saved whenever you want to backup your things, and it will copy everything from your selected Folders to the Dropbox folder.
But wouldn’t it be nice if your computer would do this automatically at a specified time every day? I think so. We can do th
at with iCal Alarms.
- Load up iCal
- Go to File > New Event, and call it what you’d like.
- Double click on your Event and go to Edit
- Choose the time you’d like it done
- Repeat: Every day
- For Alarm, choose “Open File” and then find your Dropbox action
That’s it!
I hope you enjoyed the tutorial.
Note: There’s also a free version of Dropbox available but it’s limited to 2GB.
