Mac Backup Without Login (automated)

harvey.l12 · 19 Mar 2015 at 11:09

I am looking for a way to backup a mac using time machine without having to login as a user. But i want this automated.

So here is my scenario, We have some Macs and they are never in use on a sunday, so this is when backups would happen. The Macs will be set to boot up at a specific time and boot down as a specific time but we are using a external hard drive as our backup drive which gets shared over the network. At the moment i cant find a away to mount that drive from the .sparsebundle file when the Mac boots up but i can set it to mount when a user logs in.

So the question is, is there any way to mount the drive and start it backing up by writing a script for when the Mac boots up? any help?

Thanks

slinxy · 19 Mar 2015 at 15:08

you need to enable autologin on an account without a password.

for another user to use the machine, they would need to logout of that account and relog in with theirs..

snapdragon69 · 20 Mar 2015 at 07:46

Maybe you can create a backupadmin user account on all the macs with a blank password, then set it for automatic login but with a login script or startup item of a script that goes to loginwindow (fast user switching) ready for the next user.

If you are on another Mac, you can use screen-sharing to login to the Mac remotely as a different user - you get the choice to login as another user or view the current user's screen.
Screen Sharing.app is located in Macintosh HD/System/Library/Core Services/Applications/

Time Machine is good, but also consider sharing a volume on a Mac 'server' and using Carbon Copy Cloner to make incremental backups. It uses SSH and so no console user is needed to be logged on. The security is done with certificates.

harvey.l12 · 20 Mar 2015 at 09:53

Thank you for the replies, i will mess around with some test accounts to see if i can do anything like your suggestions

harvey.l12 · 20 Mar 2015 at 10:06

Is there any way of making an account that will only automatically login on specific dates or it would mean our users would have to consistently logout the auto backup account?