Automator Question

It might be simpler to create an account of her own, where she can muck up the Desktop as she wants.

To ensure she uses her account, change the password on your account, and also enable the Require Password for when waking from sleep or screensaver. Those settings are in System Preferences > Security & Privacy.

 

That's her problem, not yours. When she clutters your desktop, you have to clean it up. When she clutters her own desktop, you don't have to do anything, except maybe tell her it's her problem to solve.

If the files are on her Desktop because the download folder is set to Desktop, you could change the download folder to something other than Desktop.

You'll have to come up with a repeatable fail case, or figure out some way of logging everything that happens, and then you'd look at the log after it doesn't work. I'm not aware of any "logging" action in Automator, but I'm not an expert in Automator.

I agree with you, Automator should work. But you haven't told us what happens when it doesn't work. That is, you expected X to happen, and Y actually happened. We don't know exactly what X or Y are. All you've said is that sometimes it doesn't work, without ever describing what "doesn't work" actually means. For example, are some files not moved, or is it an all-or-nothing failure: either all files are moved, or no files are moved.

Debugging is careful systematic observation, usually coupled with test cases. So make some test cases, keep careful observations (i.e. write everything down), and when something doesn't work as expected, then post exactly what you expected to happen and what actually happened.

You may not realize that you can write a shell script inside an Automator action (Run Shell Script), and run that instead of the action that moves the files using the builtin Automator action. This assumes you know how to write a shell script.

No crontab (note spelling) would be needed, if the shell script in the Automator action is working properly.