Schedules

A schedule connects or disconnects a group, or every drive, at a time of day on chosen days: "connect Office at 07:00 on weekdays", "disconnect everything at 23:00".

Creating a schedule

Open Drives → Schedules (Ctrl+T) and press New schedule.

The list shows each schedule in words — what it does, and when, such as "Weekdays at 07:00". The switch on each row (Run this schedule) turns one off without deleting it; the pencil and bin buttons edit and delete it.

When it runs

Schedules run while you are signed in to Helix — behind the lock screen too, since a schedule is a standing instruction like the background reconnects. They stop when you sign out or quit.

The time is your computer's local time. If you travel and the time zone changes, 07:00 means 07:00 where you are now.

The ten-minute grace

A schedule runs if its time passed no more than ten minutes ago. One missed by more than that — the computer asleep, Helix not running, nobody signed in — is skipped, not run late:

• Opening a laptop at 08:00 after it slept through 23:00 does not pull every drive down the moment it wakes.
• A "connect at 07:00" missed until 10:00 is skipped; that is what auto-connect on launch is for.
• Ten minutes still covers waking up a few minutes after the hour, or signing in right at the time.

A schedule you create or edit after its time today waits for the next occurrence rather than firing on the spot.

Each occurrence runs once. A run that fails is reported and not retried; the background reconnect and you take it from there.

What it does

A scheduled run is the same as pressing a group button: every drive in the target is connected or disconnected, whether or not it has Connect automatically on.

The one exception is the home-network pin. On a connect, a drive pinned to its home network with no away address is left out when this computer is elsewhere, so a 07:00 "connect Office" on a Saturday at home does not try to reach — or wake — a NAS across town. A disconnect ignores the pin: a drive mounted over a VPN still comes down at 23:00.

Being told

Each run says what it did — "Office was connected on schedule" — through a tray notification when the tray icon is up, or a banner in the window otherwise. If some drives could not be reached, it says so.