Auto run workflow, upon mounting of USB drive

Hi,
I am trying to create a workflow, that copies all the files for my Dissertation to a folder on a USB drive.
I have got the basic workflow to work, using Get specified finder items>Get folder contents>Copy folder contents, which works fine however I would like this workflow to automatically run every time I insert my USB stick, so it always has the most up to date version of the files on it and I cant find out how to do this last bit!
Any ideas?
Regards
Simon

you can use a launch daemon set to be triggered when you mount a disk.
Use [Lingon|http://lingon.sourceforge.net> for that. If the only disk you ever mount is your USB stick, it's quite straightforward. Just set the launch daemon to run your workflow on disk insertion.
If you also use other disks you'll simply get an error message when you mount something else and your thumb drive is not present. If you don't want to see the error message you can use an apple script. Something along the following lines:
tell application "Finder"
if exists disk "thumbdrivename" then
tell application "path:to:your:workflow" to launch
end if
end tell
and set the daemon to run that instead of your workflow.

Similar Messages

  • Auto-run workflow upon new folder contents

    How can I have my workflow, which imports an audio file into iTunes and then deletes the original, to run automatically when I save an audio file into a specific folder?
    MacBook (2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB 677 MHz)   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

    Unfortunately I believe this is impossible to do. I have been trying to figure out how to do this with iPhoto - have a folder set up to automatically import photos dropped in it into iPhoto. I have instructions on how to do it. I have read all the help files and tried every which way to Sunday to do this but it never works and never gives me an error. I am so frustrated now I have given up and will never try using Automator again.
    Automator has to be one of the most frustrating and useless pieces of garbage software ever produced by Apple.

  • Mounting my USB drive without being root

    Hi,
    I would like to mount my USB drive without being super-user.
    The command I run for mounting the drive is :
    sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbflash

    relevant options in /etc/fstab
    # /etc/fstab: static file system information
    # <file system>        <dir>         <type>    <options>          <dump> <pass>
    usbfs                  /proc/bus/usb usbfs     noauto              0      0
    /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom   iso9660   ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
    /dev/dvd /mnt/dvd   udf   ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
    /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb1 auto noauto,user,exec 0       0
    /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb2 auto noauto,user,exec 0       0
    you need to create mountpoints first:
    /mnt/usb1
    /mnt/usb2
    user will have to belong to the right groups (storage, video, optical, camera)
    usb has nothing to do with sata/scsi/ata as long as I remember usb device was sdX where /dev/sdX corresponds to the port connected.

  • How to run windows from an external usb drive

    Hi,
    I've just install windows using bootcamp. after that i restore that windows installed bootcamp volume to an GUID partitioned external HDD. Now it is shown in startup disc, but when i select that (external HDD) volume it is unable to start.
    I don't know what to do? I just want to run windows from an external usb drive like i can run mac osx.
    please help.  thanks

    Windows will not run from an external drive.

  • Cannot mount external USB drive with FDisk_partition_scheme

    Due to some recent mac issues in my lab, we updated one of the computers to Maverick 10.9.4 from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 yesterday. Anyhow, this seems to have erased the ability of the mac to read or mount several identical USB drives with the NTFS format (WD My Passport Ultra 500GB USB3.0). It could do it yesterday when it was OSX 10.6.8, but not today (OSX 10.9.4). The drives still work fine on other OSX 10.6.8, Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 computers (this is appears to be a problem with the Maverick 10.9.4 operating system itself, rather than the flash drives which work flawlessly with every other computer I've tried). I want to remove data from the computer to create backups on the USB drives (no, I don't want to create an online backup or buy a new set of USB drives).
    diskutil can see the drives, but cannot verify or repair them as they lack a GUID (GPT) partition scheme. I'm assuming this is the root of the problem. Manually mounting the drives does not work. Installing the ntfs-3g driver also did not work (I was using this to write to the NTFS drives until we upgraded OS's). Installing the WD Passport drivers for OSX also did not work. How do I get the mac to mount these drives?
    I could reformat one USB drive and then copy to the others, but this would be extremely inconvenient and take days of copying files back and forth (and would prefer to fix the mac rather than go through this with every NTFS drive I own). If I did this, the FAT32 hard drive format would not be suitable, as format is unable to handle the extremely large sequencing datasets I need to transfer. I'm not super familiar with hard drive formats, but in the event we cannot get Maverick to actually work could someone possibly suggest a format able to handle large file sizes (the largest file I need to move is ~60GB) and be compatible with Windows 8.1 / OSX 10.9.4 / Ubuntu 14.04 as well?
    Another workaround I thought of would be just to install an Ubuntu partition on the mac and get the files off through the Linux install. Which is also inconvenient, but would probably be faster than trying to reformat the drives and copy everything over onto them again given the amount of data I want to transfer.
    Unrelated, but is there any way to view files and folders in the OSX root directory besides through Terminal? It seems like this functionality was also removed when we "upgraded" from Snow Leopard. (At this point, if it were up to me I would wipe all of the macs we own and replace them with Ubuntu... even the most minor of tasks always require some sort of workaround with them... at my wits end here ).

    Yeah this definitely appears to be a problem specifically with this mac. It's been having all sorts of weird problems lately, and we figured that upgrading to Maverick might fix them (but instead we got new problems).
    To give an update on this, I ended up reformatting one of the drives to HFS+ and disabled journaling. It now recognizes the drive again, and I'm pulling the files off that way. I looked at exFAT, but it looks like HFS+ has much better Linux support (Windows is read-only but that's only a minor annoyance, as the algorithms to process the data only run on UNIX machines anyways). It's a shame I couldn't keep using NTFS (had to copy over literally EVERYTHING again...) but whatever. Again, no solution for the issue (where this mac can't read NTFS drives).
    @rkaufmann87 - To give a bit more explanation, we recently had to disable online backups because apparently the sheer amount of data causes Time Machine to freeze the computer and fail every time it has a scheduled backup (original issue we thought that upgrading to Maverick would solve... didn't work). The hard drive has been having a lot of issues when it begins to reach max capacity as well. So I am pulling off all of my files to external hard drives and deleting the local copy before we attempt to back up online again. And the data would probably take me a year and a lot of money to recreate (for the curious, it's high throughput sequencing data). I'm choosing not to take any chances as a result.

  • USB drive only mounts as Local Drive Need it to mount as USB Drive to create recovery drive

    subject pretty much says it all.  Using an HP Sleekbook 15, it tells me to make recovery disk.  I opt for the USB drive option and buy a new Sandisk Cruze Glide.  Plugged it in.  Started Recovery program to make disk.  Program tells me to insert the USB drive or plugin my DVD burner.  I check the file explorer and find the USB drive is mounted as Local Drive E:.  No amount of inserting and removal will trigger the program to continue.
    Doc read on SanDisk forum implied this is a windows 8 compatibility issue where Win 8 requires new USB drives that meet Win 8 compatibility to mount as Local devices.
    I saw here that the USB drive MUST be a removable device inorder to be made bootable. 
    Help! this is inconsistant and negates the whole reason for using removable media if it can't be made to be seen as a boot recovery drive. 
    I need a solution, can those who know please advise.

    Not all USB 3.0 is Windows 8 compatible. It will have the compability logo on the back or front of the package.
    I have run across several interesting articles that mention Windows 8 can create the Recovery Drive with I assume any flash drive.
    http://lifehacker.com/5991431/how-to-create-a-recovery-flash-drive-for-windows-8-and-free-up-some-ha...
    http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/create-a-recovery-drive-in-windows-8/7261
    ******Clicking the Thumbs-Up button is a way to say -Thanks!.******
    **Click Accept as Solution on a Reply that solves your issue to help others**

  • [Solved] Read-Only mounting of USB drives

    Hello all,
    This issue has been raised in many threads, but still I am unable to sort it out!
    My USB drives (pen drive/ Hard Disk) are always mounted in read-only mode. These are in VFAT filesystem, so I dont think ntfs-3g is needed. But I installed that anyways.
    I also tried with disabling auto mounting in dconf-editor and keeping a rule file under /etc/udev/rules.d/ as mentioned in the wiki.
    Still no luck.
    Any ideas ?
    Thanks!
    Last edited by gagan_mishra (2012-03-03 19:11:09)

    This is the output :
    /dev/sda1 on /media/2004CEA904CE80F0 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
    /dev/sdc1 on /media/ARCH_201108 type udf (ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=77,iocharset=utf8,uhelper=udisks)
    Here /dev/sdc1 is the USB drive. As you can see, its mounted as 'ro' (read only).
    Thanks!

  • Hal 0.5.14-1 does not mount some usb drives correctly

    Hi folks
    When I try to mount a USB hard disk (with KDE 4.3.4), it tries to mount it at some wrong path used by another USB hard disk.  Or I have to mount it as root, or even as root it still doesn't work right... pfff I'm really disappointed by this showstopper...
    For example, I own a LaCie hard disk (/media/disk), a Iomega one (/media/IOMEGA) and a LaCie mobile disk (no power cable, /media/MobileDisk):
    - When I try to mount the Iomega one, it works fine, as normal user;
    - When I try to mount the LaCie one, it fails, independently of the fact that the Iomega drive is mounted or not, with the following message:
    Unable to run the command specified. The file or folder file:///media/IOMEGA does not exist.
    Looks like it wants to mount the LaCie one where the Iomega one is/should be mounted...
    - When I connect the LaCie hard disk, the directory /media/MobileDisk
    is created, instead of /media/disk
    , and when as root I try to manually mount the hard disk, it says:
    ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sdb1': No such file or directory
    Maybe there's some erroneous entry in some cache or data used by hal/dbus?  I don't know how they work and how to activate their logging systems and then where to find the logs...
    Maybe there's a way to simply completely wipe out hal/dbus/consolekit/policykit/... configuration data without having to reinstall the complete system?
    I have:
      hal 0.5.14-1
      dbus-core 1.2.16-1
      dbus 1.2.16-1
      dbus-glib 0.82-2
      dbus-python 0.83.0-2
    I start KDM using /etc/inittab, as described in the wiki.  I've put "/usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon" in /etc/rc.local and have modified /etc/inittab so that it starts kdm with: "x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/ck-launch-session /usr/bin/kdm -nodaemon"! 
    Is this the right setup, equivalent to the one with xinitrc?
    The same setup works fine on my laptop.
    I've got the impression that hal/dbus/... confounds my drives and does not know where to mount them...
    Downgrading to hal 0.5.13-idontrememberwhatcifer does not solve the issue, the system is kept up to date with "pacman -Syu" about once a day and it still doesn't work...
    Some clue?
    Thanks and happy new year

    OK something happened that I can't explain...
    I just controlled about all files related to hal/dbus/mounting etc and, I don't know why, all devices I've mounted had a corresponding line in fstab... really weird.
    I juste deleted those lines, and, well, mounting seems to work again
    So this issue is solved
    And finally Arch Linux is again my favorite distro
    Last edited by yannick555 (2010-01-03 14:37:55)

  • Running Solaris 11 from a USB drive with persistent changes - possible?

    I am wanting to use Solaris 11 as the basis of a NAS for home use; the hardware is a HP N40L Microserver populated with 5 HDDs. As all of these HDDs will be used for data storage in a zpool configuration, I have no more physical space (without further hacks) inside the case for an additional OS drive. Therefore, I am wondering if it is possible to run Solaris 11 from a fast USB flash drive. I know there is a live USB image, but AFAIK, any configuration changes made when running this will not remain after a reboot - is this correct? And if so, is there any way to make the changes persistent?
    The only discussion I could find on this subject is this thread from a couple of years ago: https://forums.oracle.com/thread/2235078 - but I don't think the guy got a definitive answer.

    Running the important rpool on USB stick is not my favorite configuration. I would recommend reducing your data pool down to 4 devices and putting your root pool on the 5th disk. People ask about this in the datacenter and I wrote a best practice for it, which is not to use a USB stick for rpool, here:
    http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29007/zfspools-4.html#gentextid-12349
    Your data is important, but the root pool is very important for keeping your data available. In the datacenter, we also worried that rack vibration might wiggle the stick right out of the drive. For home use, I've heard about pets jumping on boxes and disconnecting disk cables. Sounds paranoid, but I've seen it/heard it all.
    There is no reason why you can't put rpool on a USB stick, some operations might not be easy (see Dave's post), but I don't think its the best choice for optimal data availability.
    Thanks, Cindy

  • Cant mount the USB drive to desktop

    Please help - I am trying to get the attached disk drive to display on my iMac.
    I can see the drive in the Airport Utility but cannot connect to it at all.
    I have rebooted, reverted to V7.4.1 etc. but still nothing!
    Going crazy here

    Hi,
    From what I'm reading, you are connecting your HD to your AirPort Extreme and it is not showing up. Are you looking on your desktop? Did you look in finder, when I do network sharing with my Mac it shows up in finder. In the left column under the HD section or in Network section. If it is in the Network section then I have to click the connect button
    Also is this a drive you have connected directly to your Mac before? If not try to connect it. If this works then the drive should work in the router. Also most new USB drives are formatted in NTFS. If your drive can't be written to connected to your Mac then it's formated in NTFS or anther format that Mac doesn't support.
    Just reformat it
    I hope this was helpful.
    Message was edited by: bitlord
    Message was edited by: bitlord

  • [SOLVED]failure to mount external usb drive, possible hardware malfu

    Please excuse me for posting this in the Arch forums, but I'd appreciate at least a point in the right direction. Every Google hit I came up with had a dubious solution like "reinstall USB drivers". I've never had an external drive fail on me yet, and I think this might be a sign of one. I recently moved and set up a 750gb WD external drive connected to this laptop running Arch and WinXP. Drive was working fine until this morning. I see it's entry in Thunar, but when I try to mount it:
    Failed to mount "xxx".
    WARNING: Couldn't set locale to 'en_PH.utf8' thus some file names may not
    be correct or visible. Please see the potential solution at
    http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#locale
    Error opening '/dev/sdb1': Permission denied
    Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Permission denied
    Please check '/dev/sdb1' and the ntfs-3g binary permissions,
    and the mounting user ID. More explanation is provided at
    http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#unprivileged.
    I got an entirely different error msg in Arch before, suggesting a chkdsk but I don't remember beyond that.
    In Windows, I get USB device not recognized. I've tried turning the thing off and back on, making sure it's connected and swiping cables, rebooting Arch, nothing. Is it fried? Also, how does one even run a chkdsk on a drive that can't be mounted in Windows?
    Thanks for the assistance.
    Last edited by elephantos (2008-07-11 04:59:28)

    Thunar is saying it's a permission problem... have you tried manually mounting it?

  • Cannot mount external USB drive

    During a recent update I remember pacman asking about replacing some package with another package to handle disk mounting.  I think the added package was "gnome-volume-manager" or "gnome-disk-utility" (or both).  I didn't see any postings describing problems with doing this, so went ahead and allowed the change.  Now it's a few days later and I find I cannot mount an external USB hard drive anymore.  It has an entry in fstab, and although I have tried mutiple edits of the device to associate the drive with, nothing works. 
    The disk used to associate with /dev/sdb1.  Now this device no longer exists.  Here is what has happened to my /dev/sd* entries:
    brw-rw---- 1 root disk    8,  0 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda
    brw-rw---- 1 root disk    8,  3 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda3
    brw-rw---- 1 root disk    8,  1 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda1
    brw-rw---- 1 root disk    8,  2 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda2
    brw-rw---- 1 root disk    8,  4 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda4
    brw-rw---- 1 root storage 8, 16 2009-11-04 13:00 /dev/sdb
    Trying to force association with "/dev/sdb"  "/dev/sda5" (or some other number not in use) or "sdb1" (or 2,3,4, whatever)  just yields "special device ... does not exist".
    Does anybody know how to deal with this?
    Does anybody know what package(s) I replaced when the update in question took place?  I think I'd like to reverse whatever happened.
    And on another note, I think another gnome-based package also recently replaced a package relating to printing.  Yesterday I discovered I have printing problems too:
    At first there were no printers found.  Although cups is supposed to start according to rc.conf, cupsd was not running.  I started it manually and then all the printers showed up again, though I cannot print duplex (again, worked fine before).  What is going on with these gnome packages?!?  Anyone know which package(s) I need to remove (and then what to put back) to make printing work like it used to also?
    thanks much.

    oddly, fdisk -l shows nothing, even for disks which are mounted (eg. /dev/sda4).  when I insert a standard USB thumb drive, the following show up properly:
    brw-rw---- 1 root storage 8, 32 2009-11-05 10:50 /dev/sdc
    brw-rw---- 1 root storage 8, 33 2009-11-05 10:50 /dev/sdc1
    and I am able to mount and use the drive as usual.
    The external drive I've been struggling with has xfs for filesystem type.  After using the thumb drive, /dev/sdb showed up spontaneously, but no /dev/sdb1.  attempting to mount gives:
    mount: /dev/sdb is not a valid block device 
    or
    mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist
    depending on which device is specified in fstab.
    I am thinking that either a) my ability to mount xfs filesystems has somehow been hosed, or b) there is something wrong with drive, which must have spontaneously failed very recently (it is less than 1 yr old, but this happens from time to time).
    If the drive is okay, any ideas about how mounting xfs filesystems could have been broken by recent upgrades?
    btw, the fstab entry (which worked fine until a couple days ago) is:  /dev/sdb1 /mnt/external_1 xfs rw,noauto,user,exec 0 0

  • Can I set Acrobat X to auto run OCR upon opening a new PDF?

    I want to set up Acrobat X to automatically run OCR text recognition when I open a new PDF that was sent to me via email.  I accidentally clicked the "do not show me this again" box when it would auto prompt to run upon opening.  I was thinking that if I checked "do not show me this again" it would remember my choices and automatically run it each time.

    Maybe... under Acrobat Preferences, General section there is a Reset All Warnings button.

  • [SOLVED] Mounting FAT32 USB Drive or Stick for Read/Write

    For newbies like me. First, plug in the drive and figure out the drive name with this command:
    dmesg
    It shows a kind of log file, near the end look for something like this:
    [    4.346919] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
    sdc is the drive name ('c' implies the third drive after 'a' and 'b'). Assuming one partition, the partition name is sdc1. Now determine your login user id and group id:
    cat /etc/passwd
    You're looking for a line like this where 'dbarthel' is my login id:
    dbarthel:x:1000:100::/home/dbarthel:/bin/bash
    In this case '1000' is my user id and 100 is my group id. Now create a dummy directory onto which you'll graft the drive's directories:
    sudo mkdir /mnt/usb
    You only have to do this once in the machine's lifetime. Then mount the drive:
    sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb -o uid=1000,gid=100
    '-t vfat' is the FAT32 filesystem type.
    '/dev/sdc1' is the device partition ('sdc' comes from dmesg).
    '/mnt/usb' is the part of the directory tree to graft the drive onto.
    '-o uid=1000,gid=100' is who owns the files on the drive since FAT32 is dumb [or flexible! (comes from cat /etc/passwd)]
    I'm lazy so I haven't figured out how to automount the drive when inserted (something to do with the /etc/fstab). Its easy to be lazy when you can ctrl-R on a bash command line then type 'mount' to arrow up through prior mount commands, even across logins.

    First, I think this information might be better placed in the wiki somewhere.
    Secondly, for your automounting needs, theres many threads about it. Just search the forum and wiki.

  • Terminal/Unix Command to Mount External USB Drive?

    I am having a probelm with the directory on an external HDD. The "device" is showing up in the utility software (DRIVE GENIUS/DISK UTILITY) but not the "volume," so it can't affect any repairs except INTIALIZE. So, I'm presuming the drive is physically okay - just the directory is fouled up. Is there some unix command to run that will repair the directory in some manner? Thanks!

    Hi Metroxing,
       What you presume is not a given but yes, the existence of the device file greatly decreases the relative probability of your having a hardware problem. However, I have a question. I'm not sure of what you mean by the term "directory".
       In "UNIX" jargon a directory is that which in "Mac" jargon would be a filesystem "folder". However, there is another data structure in the filesystem that I think is called a "directory". I assume that's simply an abstraction of the Catalog B-Tree and related files. I know about this use of the term "directory" from discussions and readings on Alsoft's DiskWarrior. That is supposed to do exactly what you want, "rebuild the directory structure", and is a relatively inexpensive "best-of-breed" solution.
    Gary
    ~~~~
       Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
             -- Fred Allen

Maybe you are looking for