Automator or AppleScript for copying the .bak and .dat files

[baweeks]

Reading the postings about making copies of config.dat and config.dat, as they seem to be fragile, makes me think of trying to do an Automator or AppleScript to do the job. I would think that having the Engine stopped before doing so would be valuable. However, I don't know of a script to kill a preference pane process gracefully (one could sudo killall RetroEngine, but that might be ugly and could that cause more damage to the config files?) Any idea how to script a graceful turning off of the Engine? After that, scripting the copying of the .dat and .bak files seems fairly straightforward.

-baweeks

[Mayoff]

Why no not just create copy script in Retrospect and copy that folder to another location every day?

[baweeks]

Dear Robin:

-Maybe I'm thinking too much. But my thinking was, if I use Retrospect to copy the .dat and .bak files off elsewhere (say, to my Dropbox, which can manage versioning), won't the .dat file be "open," so to speak? And if "open," won't that cause trouble if that copy of the "open" file has to be restored and put into use? In the Entourage backup discussions, there is much, much talk about having to close Entourage, and kill all of the Office background daemons before copying off the Entourage database, or else the database will be "open" and the copy of the database will likely be corrupt, as the daemons could well make a modification to it while it is being copied, so the destination does not equal the source.

-But what you're saying is, it's OK to copy off the .dat and .bak files even while they're "open," so to speak because Retro has those files open, because Retrospect is doing the copying. If that "open" file has to be put into use, Retro won't have trouble with it? You know the engineering of how Retro 8 manages these files when Retro is open, but at least do you get my line of questioning?

-Thanks for your reply

-baweeks