README.markdown

Strongspace iTunes Backup plugin

This is a plugin for the Strongspace gem to automatically backup your iTunes Library to Strongspace. Currently it only works on Mac but will support windows soon enough. It's a branch off of expandrive's iTunes backup plugin.

Currently, the only modification is to exclude Album Artwork and .DS_Store files from the backup, assuming I did this correctly.

Installation

Upgrade/Install the Strongspace gem to v0.0.9 or newer: sudo gem install strongspace

Install the Strongspace iTunes plugin strongspace plugins:install git://github.com/fitzage/strongspace-itunes.git

Now when you run strongspace help you will see these extra commands.

=== iTunes Backup
itunes:backup                                     # Performs a backup of iTunes
itunes:setup                                      # Create a backup profile for iTunes
itunes:schedule_backup                            # Schedules continuous iTunes backup
itunes:unschedule_backup                          # Unschedules continuous iTunes backup
itunes:log                                       # Opens Console.app and shows the iTunes Backup log

This plugin assumes you have key based authentication already set up. To set up password-less key-based authentication first run strongspace keys:add to get it going.

Usage

To get started just run strongspace itunes:backup

This will kick off the itunes:setup task, which lets you select your iTunes Library location and where on Strongspace you'd like to store it. Configuration is stored in ~/.strongspace/iTunesBackup.config as a YAML file. With setup complete the backup will attempt to run and will print its log to your terminal.

Following a successful backup this plugin writes a hash code to ~/.strongspace/iTunesBackup.lastbackup indicating the state of the iTunes Library the last time a successful backup was made. If you run strongspace itunes:backup again without using/modifying your iTunes library the plugin will let you know that iTunes library has not changed since last backup attempt. and exit successfully.

Scheduling

The Strongspace iTunes plugin can be easily be scheduled to continuously backup your library as it changes. To set this up run.

`strongspace itunes:schedule_backup`

This configures launchd to run the iTunes backup every minute - first checking to see if your library has changed and then performing the backup if necessary. This task stays scheduled between reboots, sleep/wake and so forth. To turn it off run strongspace itunes:unschedule_backup

Logs of the scheduled backup tasks can be viewed by running strongspace itunes:log