MacOS – Automator Calendar and Events Dissapears after OS X Update

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I have some Applescripts that I schedule to run weekdays to do various things. I record radio programs for offline listening, I download CSV files for analysis, and do file folder cleanup. These actions run at different times of the day. These are scheduled in the "Automator" calendar as Events.

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For the 4th time, I have noticed that all of my Automator events are gone and I have traced this to an OS update. Prior to going on a short vacation, I updated OS X from 10.11.5 to 10.11.6. When I came back, I noticed that none of the Automator actions had taken place. Upon investigation, I found that all of the Automator Events were gone, even past ones; it was like they never existed.

After some reflection, I realized that this usually happened after an OS X update. The Automator scripts were still there, they just didn't exist in Calendar. Strangely enough, my Exchange, and Holidays calendars with all their events were (and still are) completely intact.

Has anyone seen behavior such as this and if so, have you found a fix/workaround?

Best Answer

My solution to this was to abandon the Automaton Calendar in macOS and instead opt for using launchd. My other option was cron but that has since been deprecated in OS X

Darwin note: Although cron(8) and crontab(5) are officially supported under Darwin, their functionality has been absorbed into launchd(8), which provides a more flexible way of automatically executing commands. See launchctl(1) for more information.”

I have created and backed up all of the .plists that I need running on my machine and created a bash script that installs all of them in case I need to do a clean install of macOS in the future.

Full documentation on lauchd can be found on Apple's Developer Website

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