Arrrrgggghhhh... Apple you are pissing me off!!!!

So... for someone who keeps their whole life on her computer, losing your computer can be one of the most frustrating events ever. This is round two for me. My first laptop decided to crash'n'burn at a rather inconvenient time (as I was finishing grad courses and working on a programming project that needed to be written up in LaTeX). As it was dying I backed up what I could, and when I finally got my new computer I restored what I could. This time around I was actually even more careful. I now own a backup drive, yes a lovely 160GB external drive, I had an sync program installed, and I even used these items to perodically back up (not often enough, but none-the-less it did happen).

Great... but...

It turns out that making a copy of ones library isn't quite enough. No, no. Even though I have (in principle) all the data I should need to restore everything up to my last backup, it doesn't seem to actually work that way with important programs like iCal (where I keep track of my life) and Address Book (where I keep track of all the people in my life). AAAAARrrrrrggggg....

Ok, so after fighting with that for awhile and giving up, I decided to set out on a mission to properly back up these things, heaven forbid, this computer kicks the bucket. So, it turns out that there are indeed menu items which allow you to back up the databases of these two program. Thanks Apple! No, seriously, no sarcasm here, that's great. But, it's not really that convenient. When I back up I have one script I run and I walk away, go to bed, whatever. No user intervention necessary, because if I have to sit there and do something I'll keep telling myself I'll do it later.

So... I start searching...

I first looked for automator actions... for anyone familiar with apple these days they have probably heard-of, tried, and given up on automator several times... sounds cool, but it never seems capable of doing what you want. No luck there.. of course. So I tried just google-ing something like "Back up iCal". I got AppleScript stuff. Ok, well, I'm not familiar at all with AppleScript, but the work appeared to be done for me. So I copied and pasted and tried to run the script and I got an error. Huh. So, I walked back to the simpler version of the script and I got the same error. Huh. Seemed the problem was with a command called "click"... which seems like a pretty obvious choice to tell the computer to click on something, but maybe that wasn't quite right, so I started looking in AppleScript manuals...

4 hrs later...

Same error. Huh. I've since found instructions on the Apple website on how to click a menu item in an application, copied and pasted that, replaced all the relevant text, and lo-and-behold... same error. Huh.

All I want to do is freakin' back up my calendar and address book. Is that so much to ask????