Go Time Machine Go!

Go Time Machine Go is a Dashboard Widget for Macintosh OS X that will initiate a Time Machine backup when clicked. Your Time Machine volume will be mounted if possible (if it can’t be you’ll get a standard Finder error), and Time machine will start.

OS X Leopard has a great backup feature called Time Machine. It’s a drop dead easy backup feature, that after a simple setup, pretty much works on its own.

Users of laptops have one major issue. In order to get backups, one must either remember to plug in his Time Machine disk or make sure his network share of his Time Machine backup is mounted. Then she must wait for Time Machine to start its backup. Assuming your Time Machine disk is mounted in the Finder and the Time Machine icon is in your Dock you can control-click, or right-click on the icon and select “Back Up Now”. I ran across the fact that it is also possible to start Time Machine backups from the command line.

After going through the trouble of actually dragging the Time Machine icon to my dock, selecting “Back Up Now”, then removing the icon from the dock, I figured there had to be an easier way. That’s where this widget comes into play. All Go Time Machine Go! does is the equivalent on the Terminal command that fires off Time Machine. A nice side effect of the widget is if your Time Machine volume is not mounted it will attempt to mount the volume first. If the volume cannot be mount you will get a Finder error stating so. No big deal.

Download the widget: Go Time Machine Go!

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