smartbackup and "copy newer" rock

[geoff]

So I'm getting ready to ship my MBP to Apple, and wanted to do a full backup then zero my drive prior to letting it leave my hands. (My usual strategy is to do a full backup "every so often", create an ASR image of the full backup, then do incrementals to the live partition.)

Prior to doing the full backup, I forgot to take an image of the live partition. Sloppy, late at night, etc. I might never have noticed this, were it not for source I/O errors after I erased the live partition. Worse still, these errors were happening very early in the backup process, and I could see no way to have SD! continue past them. I didn't know I had a failing drive in addition to a bad DVI port.

After restoring my last "every so often" image to the live partition, the smartbackup/copy newer option was able to get all of my data. Apparently every one of the corrupted files was unchanged since the last successful backup. I'm a very happy man.

Now a quick question/feature request. Would it be possible to get a smart backup mode that can log I/O errors and keep trying subsequent files? In this case, if I'd had a newer corrupt file, I still would've wanted to copy the rest of my data and get a message telling me what I had lost. I was really dreading the prospect of writing that script myself, when I thought that was the feature I'd need :p

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Geoff

[dnanian]

I've written a bit about this issue in the "I/O Errors" post at the Shirt Pocket Watch (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog) blog. I'm glad you've managed to get a recovery -- lucky.

Rotate two backups, Geoff... I know you're kind of doing that already with the image, but you might want to do it with two partitions...

[geoff]

I've written a bit about this issue in the "I/O Errors" post at the Shirt Pocket Watch (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog) blog. I'm glad you've managed to get a recovery -- lucky.

Rotate two backups, Geoff... I know you're kind of doing that already with the image, but you might want to do it with two partitions...

Unfortunately, the way I use this machine (road warrior), the rotation tends to be manual and thus more failure prone than I'd like, as I just saw. The main problem is that the laptop is not predictably connected to backup drives.

Fortunately, most of the truly important stuff lives on a source control server and is automatically taken care of that way. I think I just became newly aware that there's a small but significant amount of stuff that's not "truly important" but that I would prefer not to lose, just the same.

What's the most fool-proof way you see to keep laptops that aren't on a nice, regular schedule automatically backed up?

[dnanian]

Well, you can use a product like "Do Something When" (see VersionTracker) and the general steps in the "One Touch Button" FAQ to have SD! automatically back up whenever a drive is attached... that'd be your best bet for now, I think.

Also, you could supplement your SD! usage with something like a Seagate Mirra, which would automatically back up your Mac over the network in a truly disconnected and automatic fashion...