Greetings; I’ve been having multiple problems with this one macro – I want to turn off Time Machine backup at a certain time. The simple solution seemed to be trigger – at time (12:30am), “Open Preference Pane (Time Machine)” and “Press button” Back Up Automatically. This didn’t work; at the suggestion of Peter Lewis, I added a pause before the Press Button, and then it worked.
But then it stopped working. I find error messages in the morning that say the macro timed out. So I rescripted the macro: instead of “Press Button” I substituted “Move and Click” relative to the Time Machine Preference pane. For now, that does seem to work; but clicking the “Try” button in the Macro Editor doesn’t try the macro until the specified time trigger. So I reset the time to a minute from now, and voila, the macro runs.
It would be kind of nice if I could skip the “time” step when trying a macro. But mostly I’d like to know why a macro would suddenly stop working. I can attach the macro if there’s a way to do that here. Thanks in advance.
Is your machine going to sleep before the macro can be triggered?
(Just curious – why does it matter to turn off Time Machine?)
Korm, yes–the machine is going to sleep. So would a Wake Screen action at the beginning of the macro work? That would be odd, since Wake Screen is a macro, and if macros don’t trigger when the screen is asleep…
Why it matters: originally, I wanted Time Machine to shut off before other overnight processes took place; in particular, Carbon Copy Cloner, my primary backup software. As it turns out, ccc runs just fine whether or not Time Machine is on or off. But then it became an issue of “why isn’t this working?” And the fact that the macro stopped working bothers me. I don’t like not understanding.
Change the trigger to “At system sleep” instead of “At time”. Sleep will be delayed 20 or 30 seconds until the macro completes – which should be adequate.
I’m not sure I understand – wouldn’t a “system sleep” trigger cause the macro to run every time the system sleeps?
True. I had assumed (incorrectly it seems) that in your use pattern that sleep time was 12:30 AM. So I suppose you could have your macro check the time after the sleep trigger and only proceed to disable Time Machine if the time is after xx:xx.
Thanks. I had another thought, which is to use the application launch trigger, Carbon Copy being the app. I’ll keep playing and let you know how it goes.