I found jmates’ Using automount on Mac OS X notes to be useful in making regular backups happen. I use Apple’s Backup utility but I don’t want to get in the habit of backing up to a CD or anything like that. Backing up to another drive is just fine, but if it relies on user input — authentication, for example — it’s not good. Enter automount(8). Using Jeremy’s notes and a fair bit of trial and guess about the bits I was fuzzy on, I now have automounting working so backups get written to a remote volume. Now I have to work out some way of backing that up without burning CDs or otherwise wasting money (there is a tape drive in there, after all). So now to set up automount elsewhere and make sure we’re protected.