Is there a way to schedule the screensaver to turn off or on automatically?

Question

Greetings, folks,
I have rotating firewire hardrive backups scheduled via Dantz Retrospect on my iMac G4 for all of my computers in the house. Obviously these backups utilize quite a bit of CPU power, around 90-96% on average. A problem I have is that the backup will suspend if another high CPU process starts like, the screensaver for instance. Dantz say that this is typical and to disable the screensaver when performing backups to avoid this. But if I'm not home when these backups take place then I have a problem; I also don't want to not have the screensaver turned off all of the time. Here's my question; Is it possible to schedule the automatic turning on and off of the screensaver via automator or applescript? Cheers in advance for any help.
Cheers,
D
PB 17 1.5 ghz 2gb Ram   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

A couple of things. The ScreenSaver settings are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost. You'll have to determine which one of those is the one containing the idleTime parameter. On my machine, using the Terminal app command:
defaults read /Users/baltwo/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.003065aba550 yields:
idleTime = 900;
lastPictureDirectoryChosen = "/Users/baltwo/Library/Screen Savers";
moduleName = Cosmos;
modulePath = "/System/Library/Screen Savers/Cosmos.slideSaver";
Change it with this command:
defaults write /Users/baltwo/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.003065aba550 idleTime 1800, for example, changing it from 15 minutes to 30 minutes.
Setting it up for your situation is left as an exercise since I don't know how long your backups take or when you schedule them. The Applescript command would be something like:
do shell script "defaults write /Users/baltwo/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.003065aba550 idleTime 1800"
G4 450 MP Gigabit   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  
G4 450 MP Gigabit   Mac OS X (10.4.3)