I have several external drives hanging around. It’s hard to remember what’s on which, despite naming them, labeling them with their names and writing down … somewhere … what’s on them.
I also have some NFC tags lying around that I’ve never figured out what to do with.
It occurs to me: I should be able to stick a tag on each drive and set my phone to show me a contents list when I tap a tag. Preferably, that contents list is stored in the cloud (iCloud or Dropbox) and is plain text or csv — I try to keep everything I can in plain text, and use nvUltra, Obsidian, NotePlan and similar apps to view and edit.
So… bright Automators, what’s the best way to (in order of importance):
open a plain text or csv document on my iPhone when I tap an NFC tag?
update (or replace) a plain-text file list on a Mac with the contents of an external drive? Ideally this would happen on dismounting, to capture any backup changes, but I realize other triggers could be easier.
On my Mac, I use Keyboard Maestro, TextExpander and Hammerspoon pretty regularly, have Hazel and would love to use it more, and I’m not on Monterrey, so no Shortcuts on Mac. I do use Shortcuts and Scriptable (preferred) on iOS, as well as 1Writer. I use Drafts on both, but just to create notes, not to store them. Happy to consider other tools though.
Thats an easy one: you can try it with Drafts (free iCloud-sync). Scan a NFC (“Ghost” is just an Amiibo-card of Boo ) → action “Open Draft” (select the draft you need (“Backup 01” for me). Done.
The shell command above worked for cataloging a disk, but the results weren’t very readable. I also discovered I don’t necessarily need/want every single file in a catalog (down to the last plist item in a clone backup…).
Instead, I ended up either:
dragged the icon for the drive from Finder into a blank BBEdit document; BBEdit automatically created a nicely indebted and complete file tree; or
opened the drive’s file structure to the degree I wanted in the Finder (list view), selected everything, copied (cmd-c), and then pasted in a blank BBEdit document; this gave me an unindented list of files, which I could then indent manually (if it wasn’t too long) – useful for drives with Time Machine backups of multiple machines, for example, where you don’t necessarily want every file, just the names of the machines
NFC tags are fun – but they aren’t very compatible with a taste for sleek/modern looking external drives, at least not if those drives have the wrong kind of metal enclosure.
The small tags I have work perfectly off drives and on plastic enclosures. But on some metal enclosures, my phone just wouldn’t read them.
I tried a layer of duct tape about the size of the tag, but it wasn’t enough. There are apparently “metal NFC” tags that are supposed to solve this, but I haven’t tried that yet.
There are indeed. I’ve used them and would highly recommend them. When I last purchased some (several years back), they were only fractionally more expensive than regular ones.
) → action “Open Draft” (select the draft you need (“Backup 01” for me). Done.
