Manual Weekly Cron Jobs

This weekend I’ve ended up with a list of two basic tasks that absolutely need to be performed by me to keep important things up-to-date. The first one has been going on for months (years now actually) and that is performing a SuperDuper! Smart Update backup of my MacBook to my external backup disk. This is wicked important as a good, durable, bootable backup (which semi-sadly Time Machine backups aren’t) is very good to have staying in one place (especially for a portable computer). The second, and newer, addition to my manual weekly cron job list is syncing my iPod Touch. This is new as of just this weekend and is important so the data is current on both my MacBook and the iPod. This data includes music, videos, photos, calendars, contacts, and Safari bookmarks just to name a few. In this process the iPod gets it’s user data (preferences, notes, etc.) backed up onto my MacBook. That makes my wonder which order to perform these two tasks in. Doing the syncing first means that the iPod’s backup makes it’s way into the weekly bootable backup, but doing the bootable backup first means I have a copy of all the data before the iPod adds it’s changes into it during the syncing. Also, syncing the iPod is not the only way it charges (I have a FireWire dock connector attached directly to a power strip for that) so syncing the iPod really will only happen once a week. I also wonder how many more weekly maintenance tasks like these two I’ll accumulate over time and need to add to my weekend. Enjoy, Alex.