I’m not only the co-President of the Vienna Club for Men, Women, and Others: I’m also a client. Before I became a Vienna developer, I was a user. During development and debugging of the app, I don’t want to corrupt my user data, e.g., database and preferences, so I back them up before I do anything dangerous. Believe me, anytime I launch Xcode, it’s dangerous.
A long time ago I created a set of Automator actions to back up the files and restore them afterward. Yes, I’m the one of the five or so people in the world who actually use Automator. (Otto who? Auto Parts?) However, after I bought a laptop — or portable computer not for use on your lap under any circumstances, on penalty of burnt naughty bits
, as they say — and I started using a FileVault account, I discovered that Otto and FileVault don’t play well together. (They can’t agree on who has to be Samwise.) Thus, I needed a new method of backing up and restoring my Vienna files.
Presto Change-o, Hocus Pocus, I created a custom Xcode project to do the job. At first I was just going to provide it to Vienna developers, but then I decided that I could (semi-)easily make it configurable to handle the files of other apps, since application support files tend to reside in standard locations. Later, greed got the better of me, and I decided to charge $50 a head for my creation. Finally, sanity got the better of me, and I’m making the source available for download. You can still send me $50 if you like, $100 if you have two heads.
The project is called BackupAppFiles, which is pretty boring, I admit, but hey, my parents named me Jeff Johnson. Anyway, BackupAppFiles comes configured to handle Vienna support files. To handle the files of a different app, just change the string constants in BAFConstants.m to match the file names. You can compile different versions to handle different sets of files on the same computer, but you’ll need to change the PRODUCT_NAME build setting for each version, because the location of BAF’s own support files depends on that setting.
The standard disclaimers apply once again. I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof, etc. Please back up your files before using BackupAppFiles. (Yes, I recognize the irony there. No need to point it out, really.) I take no responsibility if BackupAppFiles erases your hard drive or makes your head explode, though I will refund your $50 in the latter case. (It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.) Let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, or complaints. About BackupAppFiles, that is. Or a plate of shrimp. I’ll also take bug reports and patches, just no feature requests. Now let’s go get sushi.
How much work would it bo to change this into an app to sync my vienna files across two computers? That way I could keep up to date with all my Vieena feeds from my desktop or my laptop? I was thinking about using a portable version of Vienna on a USB drive or shared network drive to do the same thing, but I worry that the portable version won’t be updated as often as the official version.
I will read my posts in the future before hitting submit!