I was wondering if anyone has any experience with using Hazel to manage files on a network share?
I would like my Mac mini to automate operations on files stored on my Synology. The mini handles cloning the Synology shares, and backing them up to Arq, and so the shares are generally mounted (by Arq and by CarbonCopyCloner) to the mini.
Has anyone had experience with this? Does Hazel “fail gracefully” if the network share is not mounted when a rule executes? The rules will both process files on the mini that would then need to be moved to the Synolgoy, and moving files around/renaming on the Synology itself, so it is important that Hazel figures out that the share is not mounted and continues to try to process that file until the share reappears and the rules can finally be executed.
I was also thinking I would have Keyboard Maestro check, maybe every 10 minutes and if the share is not mounted, run an AppleScript to mount it to ensure it stays mounted. Has anyone found this useful and/or looked at other ways to keep the share mounted that have worked well?
Thanks for any ideas / feedback.
I use it with network shares for almost 100% of my Hazel rules. I rarely have a share dismount, but I do remember having to set up the rules, which move and rename the files, always do the move before the rename because if the rename was first the file would be repeatedly renamed until it could perform the move. Some renames append information to the name, so the name would just get longer and longer until the rename would fail! SO the rule is reapplied until it can succeed, but make sure you aren’t doing something in the rule before the move!
Thank you. That is very helpful.
I recently ran into a similar renaming issue. I am settin up my new MBP to replace the old one and was adding Hazel rules on the new system. One rule pulls the creation date out of a pdf and appends it to the beginning of the filename. Each time one machine ran the rule and renamed each file, the other would see the file as changed, run the same rule, and back and forth! Sitting st one computer I watched the names growing until I realized the problem!
The solution was, of course, to write the rule correctly with a condition to exclude files already starting with the date pattern. And to write a python script to fix all the file names by removing all but one date from th evbehinning of the name.