Civ3Backup - An OS X Autosave Utility

[AlanH]

Here is a pair of OS X script files that you can drop into your Home directory and run in the background while you play Civ3 to copy each new autosave file to a separate folder as it is created. I developed this utility so that I would not forget to save GOTM files at the key dates required by the rules, and also to allow all those post mortems I'd like to do to see where I went wrong .... if I only had the time

Warning #1: The scripts involve a bit of text editing to configure the file paths - just one or two of strings in one of them, and you need to use the OS X Terminal to run or stop the process. So if you are nervous around the Terminal this utility may not be for you.

If there's a lot of demand I *might* be persuaded to wrap this up in a nice Cocoa application, but for now it's rather naked and ugly.

Warning #2: Autosave files are not compressed. Files for a single completed game can easily exceeed 1 GByte of disk space. You can use a compression utility to pack a complete game into a tenth of this space once it is finished, but you have been warned!

There are two files in the attached zip archive. Both should be placed in your Home directory. The one called "Civ3Backup" contains the instructions for configuration and operation, as well as the parameters that you need to edit to set it up for your system. The other file is called "syncfolders", and should not be modified unless you are really ambitious.

Please PM, email or post here if you need assistance with them or if you spot any errors.

 

[Trixter]

Thanks in advance. Gonna give it a try later.

[EDIT] Just tried it and like it. ^_^
The biggest problem I found were the two or three typos in your instructions, but I guess it's: find'em, keep'em...

Also thought about an easier way to kill the process afterwards, but can't come up with anything nice... will probably use text clips for the terminal commands or something like that...

As for the wrapper-app: I don't think you really need it. It's not that hard to set it up or use it (and I like to see the terminal once in a while to check if it's still there *g*).

 

[AlanH]

Originally posted by Trixter
Just tried it and like it. ^_^
The biggest problem I found were the two or three typos in your instructions, but I guess it's: find'em, keep'em...

Typos ????? Moi ?????!!!!!

Well, I did type it up at 03:00 this morning, but I can only find two - "scriot" instead of "script" near the beginning and a lower case "e" at the start of a sentence near the end. Did you find anything that was any more confusing or life-threatening than those?

[Edit] Ah! I also found that the syncfolders script says it's a tcsh script. That's a downright lie, left over from when it was one. I converted them to bash after I discovered that C shell programming can be bad for you.