I use Entourage for email, news and for syncing with my Palm. I needed a way to backup the user area automatically to a single file so that I could use Backup to put that file to my idisk.
I decided to use shell scripting and make use of the /etc/daily script that is called from cron via periodic. My script could be expanded and could be used on an XServe with multiple users. A System Admin could use this script to automatically create single file backups of their users' Entourage data in their home directories.
Here is the code as appended to the end of /etc/daily.
# #Checking if Entourage is up and creating backup # ent_up=`ps ax | grep Entourage | grep -v grep | wc -l` if [ $ent_up -gt 0 ]; then echo "" echo "Entourage is currently running - backup aborted" exit 1 fi for user in [user1] [user2] do echo "" echo "Creating New MSData file for $user" cd /Users/$user/Documents tar -cf $user_MSData.tar "Microsoft User Data" gzip -f $user_MSData.tar chown $user MSData.tar.gz echo "Finished Creating Entourage Backup for $user" doneIf you have lots of users or your usernames change, change the for users in line to:
for users in `ls /Users | grep -v Shared`Of course, if you are on an Xserve, some people may not use Entourage, so you could always do a check for the directory /Users/username/Documents/Microsoft User Data directory and if it exists, then do the tar.
find /Users -name "*MSData.tar.gz" -exec mv {} /backup ;
[robg adds: I have not tested this script.]
Mac OS X Hints
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