Noodlesoft Forums

Is there a way to have have hazel process files on one drive ONLY when another (external USB) drive is present?

Thanks in advance...

Can you describe why you want to do this? You can maybe write a script to do this but without more details I can't say.

Thanks Mr Noodle,

I have a collection of TV episodes that reside on my hard drive. When I plug in the USB drive I wish a subset of those files to be copied over namely:

- those that match a specific naming pattern (this I can do with "Name contains");
- that have not been copied before (this I CANNOT do);
- and then eject the disk (this I can do via a shell script).

I attempted to use colour labels to do this (colour the file after copy and stipulate that only files lacking the colour could be copied in the future), however the colour change was always applied to the copy on the USB drive.

Since I last posted I have had a play adding the criteria "Date Last matched" "not in the last" "2 years" which I think is working, but if there is a better way I would love to hear it

Thanks!

Well, first off, I don't see a reason to only match if a drive is connected in that if either drive is not present, the rule will fail and Hazel will retry later.

As for only copying files that haven't been copied before, you can either (a) use something like "Date added is after date last matched" or (b) use the Sync action. Search the forum on how to do the latter as there are other caveats with doing that.