Creating a magnet, or agent, involves three basic steps: telling Magnet™ what to find, determining the magnet’s action (copy, move, alias), and telling Magnet when to run. Create a new magnet by selecting New from the File menu. A new untitled magnet window appears.
STEP ONE: Tell Magnet what to find.
Use the Find by pop-up to select various filters to find the desired files. Each filter that you select appears in the filter list. You can dismiss search filters by clicking on the close box on each filter. Help text appears in the area below which describes the files that this magnet will find. Chapter 3 in the User’s Guide describes each search filter in more detail. To display a list of the matching files, click the Find button. Once you have displayed the matching files, you can locate, open, alias, copy, or move a selected file by using the Utilities menu.
To finish setting up the magnet, you need to go to the schedule view. Click on the View toggle button. The schedule view allows you to set the magnet’s action and triggers.
STEP TWO: Select the action.
Click the Copy, Move, or Alias button depending on the action that you would like the magnet to perform. Chapter 4 of the User’s Guide gives information about uses for the different actions.
STEP THREE: Tell Magnet when to run.
3a) To set up a calendar trigger, click on a date on the calendar. 3b) Disk mount triggers, shutdown triggers, or idle triggers are selected from the Trigger menu. You can save a magnet without any triggers. This magnet can be run manually by clicking Run in the schedule view. Triggers are described in more detail in Chapter 4 of the User’s Guide.
Since the magnet will pull files or aliases into the folder where it is located, it is important to save the magnet in the location where you want the items to go. To save the magnet, click on the Save… button in the Schedule view. The text in the bottom of the Save dialog describes the action of the magnet.
SAMPLE MAGNETS
The following section describes the steps to create several popular magnets. For more information on these and other magnets, see Chapter 7 of the Magnet User’s Guide.
BACKUP MAGNET:
This magnet will backup files meeting specified criteria. You can, for example, create a backup magnet that backs up files in a certain “backup folder,” or backs up documents that have been modified in the last week.
Launch Magnet and choose New from the File menu. A new magnet opens with its Find view displayed.
STEP ONE: Tell Magnet what to find.
Set up the search criteria to specify the files you wish to backup. For example, you could set it to find all Word files that were created in the last week or all files located in a certain folder. To test your settings, you can click on the Find button and Magnet will immediately list the files that meet your criteria.
Now click on the View toggle button (the magnifying glass) to go to the Schedule view.
STEP TWO: Select the action.
Click Copy in the middle of the schedule window to select the action. Since this is a back up magnet, you might also want to preserve your folder structure. To do this click and hold on the copy button. Select the nested folder option.
STEP THREE: Tell Magnet when to run.
You can set this magnet to run automatically —each day at a certain time, once a week, or whenever a certain volume appears on the desktop.
To set a Disk trigger, select Disk Mount from the Trigger… pop-up menu. A Disk Mount trigger appears in the trigger list. Select a volume from the pop-up on the trigger. The magnet will back up your files whenever this volume appears on the desktop.
To set a Date trigger, click on a date in the calendar. A Date trigger appears in the trigger list. Select the desired date options, such as every day, every week, etc., from the pop-up on the Date trigger.
Finally, save the magnet in the folder where you want the backup files to be placed. If you wish, you can now run the magnet manually by clicking on the Run button in the schedule view.
AUTOMATIC REMOTE FILE RETRIEVAL:
One of Magnet’s most powerful features is its ability to have one Macintosh® log onto another Macintosh, find the desired files, and log off the volume—all automatically with AppleTalk® Access Remote and FileShare.
To set up an automatic magnet which uses AppleTalk Remote Access and FileShare you must first mount the volume that you wish to access.
• To access a volume on your network, use the Chooser to log onto the desired volume. For more information regarding AppleShare® or FileShare, see the documentation supplied with your Macintosh.
• Or, set up AppleTalk Remote Access (ARA) to dial into the correct network. In order for Magnet to automatically connect to the ARA volume, you will need to check the box so that ARA will save your password. Once you are connected to the remote network, use the Chooser to log onto the desired volume. For more information regarding AppleTalk Remote Access, see the documentation supplied with the ARA software.
Once the desired disk is mounted on the desktop, launch the Magnet application and choose New from the File menu.
STEP ONE: Tell Magnet what to find.
Select Location from the Find by pop-up menu and select the volume that you just mounted from the pop-up menu on the Location tile. If you wish to save your password, click the Password… button. A dialog appears, allowing you to decide whether or not the magnet will store your password. Set up any other search criteria that you wish to use. If you wish, click Find to confirm that the expected files are found.
Once the search criteria are correctly set up, click on View toggle button (the magnifying glass) to go the Schedule view.
STEP TWO: Select the action.
Now setup the action that you wish to use. For this magnet, you would want to use the Copy action. To select the copy action, click on the Copy action button.
STEP THREE: Tell Magnet when to run.
In the Schedule view, you can set this magnet to run automatically — each day at a certain time, once a week, or whenever a certain volume appears on the desktop.
To set a Disk trigger, select Disk Mount from the Trigger… pop-up. A Disk Mount trigger appears in the trigger list. Select a volume from the pop-up on the trigger. The magnet will back up your files whenever this volume appears on the desktop.
To set a Date trigger, click on a date in the calendar. A Date trigger appears in the trigger list. Select the desired date options, such as every day, every week, etc., from the pop-up on the Date trigger. As an example, you could set this magnet to run every Monday before you arrive at work so that the files that you will need from the server will already be copied to your computer. To do this, click on any date that falls on a Monday on the calendar, and select “Every Monday” from the Date trigger’s popup menu.
Finally save the magnet in the folder where you want the files to be placed. If you wish, you can run this magnet manually by clicking on the Run button in the schedule view.
SYNCHRONIZE MAGNETS:
Synchronize magnets keep the contents of two folders, or even two Macintosh computers the same. After you change files in either location, Magnet will update the other location with the most recent copy of the file. We’ve made the process of creating synchronize magnets very easy by adding a menu option which automatically synchro-nizes the two folders that you specify.
To Synchronize two folders, launch the Magnet application and choose Synchronize… from the Magnet menu.
Simply, identify which folders you’d like to synchronize as described in the following steps.
To specify the first folder, click the first folder button. A standard file dialog appears, allowing you to locate the folder. Once the folder is located, click to select it. Then, click the Select button.
To specify the second folder, click the second folder button. Use the standard file dialog to locate and select the second folder in the same manner.
If you wish to change the folders that you have selected, simply click again on the folder buttons. If you wish to cancel the synchronization, click the dialog close box.
The Synch button will now be active. Click Synch to create the magnets and synchronize the contents of the two selected folders. Synchronize magnets can be modified to update specific documents or files created within the past couple days. For more information on modifying synchro magnets, see chapter 3 in the Magnet User’s Guide.
INSTALLING MAGNETS
Another important aspect of Magnet is the capability of sharing magnets that have already been created. Before a magnet will run, it needs to be installed into Magnet’s schedule queue. Installation is a safety feature built into Magnet to ensure that you understand what a magnet does before you run it on your system.
To Install a magnet follow these steps:
Open the magnet by double clicking the magnet file in the Finder or by selecting the file and selecting Open from the File menu. The magnet’s Find view appears. Look at the magnet’s search filters to determine the files it will find. You can use the Find button to list the files, if you wish.
Click the View toggle button to go the Schedule view. Click the Install button in the gray area in the middle of the window.
You can now run the magnet by clicking the Run button .
