Zip a folder on a daily basis (mac)

Question

I have an online backup utility (zipcloud.com) And i scheduled an upload of projects folder every day at 12pm. Thing is my projects folder contains a lot of files so i thought the best I could do is to write a code to automatically zip the folder before it gets uploaded each day.

I have no knowledge of python or other mac languages in order to get this done. So help is really appreciated! :)

Answer 1

You can write a script to compress your file - and then use the cron command to schedule it run it daily at the time you want.

Answer 2

The best thing you could do is create a little script that could compress your files. You can add the script as a crontab and set the time daily at 12pm. I am not sure if you would also like the script to SEND it to the server, but that would be easily possible.

You can check the python page here; http://docs.python.org/library/zipfile.html and crontab page here; http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man5/crontab.5.html

Good luck.

Answer 3

Edit the crontab with crontab -e (or EDITOR=nano crontab -e) and add a line like this:

59 23 * * * cd ~/Notes; zip ~/Documents/Backups/Notes\ `date '+\%Y-\%m-\%d'`.zip *.txt

The format is minutes hours days months weekdays command. 0 */2 * * 1-5 would run a command every other hour on weekdays. % has to be escaped as \% in the command field.