I have some scripts which try to do backups on the laptop. It is a little more involved, since the laptop lid is closed most of the time, including at night. So the strategy is to have a cron job start periodically, determine if a backup had been done today and if not, attempt to do one.

Since the laptop could be in various locations, it tries to determine where it is – i.e. if it is in a known location (my house or my sister’s house, or one of my DC friends houses). If so, it can back up accordingly. This is done using SSIDs, which is adequate if not elegant.

One issue I’ve had is if the attempted backup starts right after the lid is opened, the wireless may not be ready yet, and so the backup may fail on account of no network. So I set out to try to figure out how to detect when the network is available, so the script can obtain that information. Continue reading Laptop backup and Lid events →