Scheduling background activities like making backups has moved from cron to launchd, and now to a more complex system. This has reduced the reliability of macOS and made it harder to support.
XPC
How scheduling concurrent and background tasks using XPC Activity works, and compares with alternatives such as NSBackgroundActivityScheduler.
Trying to get a more coherent overview of the different paths to concurrent, asynchronous, and background task management in macOS. Draft for discussion.
The aim is to be able to run commands at regular intervals using GCD rather than launchd. Here are details of the code and resulting log entries, casting light on how GCD works.
Despite its documentation vanishing, it’s clear that GCD does a lot more than provide an easy way to concurrency for app developers.
Working out why Time Machine backups go wrong isn’t necessarily that different from unravelling classical mythology. In some ways.
The Eclectic Light Company 