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Workflows

A backup plan is a picture. So draw it.

Folders are cards. Arrows are steps. The strip underneath says in what order they run. A single sync is a workflow with one arrow, so there is one way to build everything.

A worked example

The Nightly 3-2-1 backup

Three copies of everything, on two kinds of storage, with one copy in another city. Here is how that looks when a small studio in Madrid builds it.

3

copies of every file

The original on the MacBook Pro or the Travel SSD, a copy on Atlas, the NAS in the office, and a copy offsite.

2

kinds of storage

Disks in the office, and a cloud account that is nowhere near them.

1

copy somewhere else

Harbour, a second NAS in Lisbon, gets a mirror of the backups every night. OneDrive gets the documents too.

The Nightly 3-2-1 backup canvas with eight folders and six numbered steps, all finished.
Every name on this page is made up: Atlas, Harbour, the studio and its folders.
Six steps, in order

What happens at 02:00

The order strip is the truth about when each step runs, whatever shape the picture has. Gates between the chips decide what a problem upstream means downstream.

  1. Documents → Backups on Atlas

    Backup: copies new and changed files and never deletes. Compared by name, size and date.

    Starts after Atlas and Harbour have been woken
  2. Photos → Backups on Atlas

    Mirror, compared by checksum, so a photo that rots quietly on one disk is caught.

    Only if step 1 had no problems
  3. Footage on Travel SSD → Media on Atlas

    Waits up to 30 minutes for the drive to be plugged in, then backs it up.

    Only if step 2 had no problems
  4. Backups on Atlas → Offsite on Harbour

    Mirror to Lisbon. The card says "Deletes extras", so nobody forgets what a mirror does.

    Runs together with 5 and 6, if step 3 was clean
  5. Backups on Atlas → OneDrive

    Backup to the cloud: the second kind of storage.

    Runs together with 4 and 6
  6. Media on Atlas → Media on Harbour

    The big one: footage offsite, mirrored by name and size.

    Runs together with 4 and 5
Running

Progress lives on the arrows.

No separate progress window to hunt for. The canvas fills in as the night goes: green for finished, blue and filling for running, dashed for skipped by a gate.

  • Machines woken first. Harbour sleeps all day; the workflow wakes it, waits for its shares, and records that it woke it rather than found it awake.
  • Problems do not stop everything. A file that cannot be written is listed with what to do about it, and the rest carries on.
  • History for every run: what was copied, what went to a trash, and how long it took.
The workflow mid-run with steps 4, 5 and 6 running together and showing progress and time left.
When it runs

On a schedule, when a drive arrives, or when you say.

Times of day

Every night at 02:00, or weekdays at 19:30 and Saturdays at noon, in one workflow. A Mac that was asleep at the time runs it when it wakes.

When a drive connects

"Footage from Travel SSD" runs the moment that particular drive is plugged in, recognised by the drive and not just its name.

By hand

Analyze All to see what every step would do, then Sync. Or stop at each step and read the table before it goes.

From the menu bar

What ran last night, what runs next, and a Run Now for each workflow, without opening the window. It can start at login.

Workflows are files

Export a workflow, keep it with your notes or send it to another Mac, and import it there. The command line runs the same workflows the app does.

Build it once. Sleep on it.

Next: the guards that stop a run before a mistake becomes a loss.

How it keeps files safe
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