Here are some workflows that for me are much easier to do with the command line, in the hope that you might find something useful: Love to see people with non-programming jobs getting so much use out of the command-lineĪs a dev, I always have a terminal open and ready to type in, so some things might be easier for me to do with CLI, but not so much to someone less interested in learning intricacies like pipes, redirections, package installers etc. That will give you a dated archive file on your external drive, containing all your documents. Tar cvfz /Volumes/ExternalDrive/mydocs-$today.tgz /Users/yourname/Documents That literally recursively copies everything from your Docs folder to your external drive.Īnd if you want to get a bit more exotic, create a shell script that does today=$(date '+%F') Rsync -r /Users/yourname/Documents /Volumes/ExternalDrive/ So on the 1st minute of the 4th hour, assuming your Mac is awake, that will archive your Documents folder to your external hard drive.Īnd if you just want to sync your Documents folder to that external drive, noncompressed, try rsync: Type “crontab -e”, and you’ll get a file where you can type fun things like:ġ 4 * * * tar cvfz /Volumes/ExternalDrive/MySuperSecretDocuments.tgz /Users/yourname/Documents Gives you a gzipped tarball of your Documents folder.Īnd then, for the bonus, you can start playing with the crontab to schedule things. Tar cvfz /Volumes/ExternalDrive/MySuperSecretDocuments.tgz /Users/yourname/Documents And you can gzip while you tar with a command line switch: “Tar” literally creates an uncompressed file of everything you ask it to add. I was looking for an app but didn’t like the implementation and so I tried unrar you can get through homebrew and it also works so nice.įWIW, if you’re talking about archiving on the command line “tar” and “gzip” are your friends. I archived a lot of old docs with Winrar back in my Windows days some 20 years ago.

Unrar mac terminal