A script to see Time Machine progress via Growl
By: Brian Webster |
During long Time Machine backups, I often find myself checking the console for messages from backupd indicating how progress is going, especially when it has to delete a bunch of old backups to make room for the new one, which can take quite a bit of time. I found myself wishing I could just be notified via Growl whenever a new messages popped up in the console, rather than having to check it myself. So, being a programmer, I naturally wrote a script to do it for me.
The script relies on the growlnotify command line tool, one of the extra downloads that you can get with Growl, so you’ll need to download and install that tool first. It’s written in Ruby, and uses the syslog tool to read the messages and then pipe them into calls to growlnotify, so they appear on the screen as Growl notifications. You can find the script as a gist on Github at the link below.