Scheduled Synchronizations

If you need to schedule synchronizations, you can make use of Mark Malson’s excellent (and free) “Cron.”  This faceless background application constantly scans its own preferences folder for aliases to items you want scheduled.  These aliases are labelled according to a Unix-like format.  For example, if you wanted a certain SwitchBack document to be launched at 5pm every weekday, you would place an alias to that document in the “Cron Preferences” folder, and label it “0 17 * * 1-5”.  For more details see the documentation supplied with “Cron”, available at the usual mirror sites of Sumex and UMich.

An alternative is Mark Alldritt’s powerful shareware program “Scheduler.”  This control panel/extension combination has a number of features that make it work particularly well with SwitchBack.  One of these is the ability to open a document when a disk is mounted.  It is simple to set up a system whereby a synchronization is automatically performed whenever a certain disk is inserted.  A limited demonstration version of this software is available at the usual mirror sites of Sumex and UMich.

Finally, you can use AppleScript to schedule a synchronization at a certain time.