TASK — Scheduled tasks

TASK The system’s task scheduler: what starts on its own, and when.

Browse

The scheduler is already arranged in folders: on Windows, \Microsoft\Windows\Defrag holds defragmentation. Meneaufile browses it like a disk — folders open on double-click, the breadcrumb goes back up, search and sorting work as everywhere else.

Each task shows its state (ready, running, disabled), its next and last run, its last result, its triggers in words — “Every week, Mon, Fri at 21:30” — and what it runs. The author and the description can be shown by choosing the columns.

The button only appears where a scheduler answers: on Windows, when the “Task Scheduler” service is running.

Act

On right-click: Run, End, Enable, Disable, Delete — on one task or on a whole selection. Del deletes too, after naming what is going.

System tasks, under \Microsoft\Windows, can only be touched with administrator rights: Meneaufile then asks again with them, once for the whole selection, and says when elevation is refused.

Create, edit

New task…, on right-click of a folder or in the button’s menu, opens the dialog; double-clicking a task opens it there too. In it you set:

its name, its folder and its description;
what it runs: the program or script, its arguments, the folder to start in;
when: once, every X minutes from a start time, daily, weekly — with its days —, at log on, at startup; as many triggers as needed;
the account — your own, while signed in; your own, even when signed out, with your Windows password, which the scheduler keeps; or the system account — and the highest privileges.

A trigger the dialog cannot write — on a log event, every fifteen minutes for one hour only — is shown there, and kept as is. On Windows, the task is rewritten over its original definition: its conditions, its power settings and its other actions stay put.

Scheduling an Meneaufile action

A backup every evening, a database export every morning: Meneaufile’s actions can be scheduled. Schedule… is found in the dialogs that already confirm them:

backup and synchronisation (F10, F11) — the direction and the comparison rule are carried over;
copy and move (F6, Ctrl+F6), and drag and drop;
compression (F9) — the archive takes the date of each run, work-2026-10-03.zip, and never replaces the previous day’s;
exporting a database or a table: Schedule the export…, on right-click.

The dialog says what will be done, then asks when — the same triggers as for a task — and under which account. What a question would have settled is decided in advance: the conflict policy is chosen there, and nobody will be asked. The task is stored in the scheduler’s \Meneaufile folder; that is where you change its schedule or delete it.

When the task fires:

An Meneaufile window is open: the action goes into its queue, as if you had started it yourself.
No window, signed in: a window opens for it, and stays.
Signed out (“even when signed out”, or the system account): the action runs without a window. The system account sees neither network shares nor saved passwords: it suits local files.

A system notification says how it ended, the log records it, and the task’s last result keeps it: 0 for succeeded, 2 for finished with errors, 1 for a failure. A source or a target protected by the master password is not backed up while signed out: nobody would be there to type it. On Linux, the action is scheduled to run while you are signed in.

On Linux

Three folders: systemd, the system’s timers; systemd-user, the user’s; crontab, their crontab. A new task is written as a user timer — a .service and a .timer in ~/.config/systemd/user —, or in the crontab if you put it there. Under the system account, it goes to /etc/systemd/system, and PolicyKit asks for the password.

In the crontab, an Meneaufile task is named by a comment # meneaufile: name above its lines; lines written by hand are read under their program’s name, and stay where they are. What a package placed in systemd can be disabled, but is not erased: its next update would put it back.

Meneaufile manual, in English.