How to Force Mac OS X Sync & Backup

Sep 30, 2012 · 1 min read

Synchronization is beautiful, when it works. For whatever reason, sometimes, a sync just doesn’t get triggered when you need it. This makes verifying changes more time consuming than it should be. In my case, one of those scenarios was the synchronization between the Mac OS X contacts app and Google Contacts.

Thankfully, Mac OS X supports force syncing contacts through a menubar icon, so changes can be verified with confidence. However, if you’re like me and don’t want an extra menubar icon, you can force sync to Google Contacts with the following terminal command:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GoogleContactSync.framework/Versions/A/Resources/gconsync --sync com.google.ContactSync

Another helpful terminal command is to force start a Time Machine backup, which means you can get rid of yet another menubar icon (Time Machine):

/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper

You could also setup cronjobs for both. What you should takeaway from this post is that many features of your OS have multiple interfaces. Whenever you see something that could be done more productive, I encourage you to research if there’s already a solution in place that you could use or extend.