Disk full!

[mrpixel]

I remember a time when I would tease my PC friends with the situation where you try to copy data from one disk to another and there isn't enough space.

Windows will happily copy the data across and then give a 'DisK Full' error. The Mac would tell you at the beginning that there is insufficient space for the copy.

I've just had the same situation with SuperDuper. I just tried to copy 110Meg of data onto a 80Mbyte partition. Three hours later, it tells me the disk is full and it can't proceed!

Okay, I didn't check that there was enough space and I should have but SuperDuper could easily check at the beginning of the copy - could it not?

[dnanian]

No, not really. First, we don't know how much data you're copying (we only know how large the drive is). To check, we'd have to simulate the entire backup to see what would be added, removed, shared, etc.

Doing that before every copy would basically double your copy time, every time... we've elected to fail very occasionally rather than waste your time in the majority of cases.

[mrpixel]

In cloning the system, I would expect to copy all the data. If I look at Info for the disk, it tells me how big the drive is, how much is used and how much is available. Is it not possible to use this information to determine if it is worth trying to copy? Even if it is not totally accurate, you could put up a warning that says that it might not fit. Better than waiting three hours for nothing.

[dnanian]

But we don't know you're copying everything: "Backup - all files" is just a name...

[mrpixel]

Sorry, I don't understand. If I clone a volume, I expect everything to go across. If the volumes are identical in size and a byte for byte copy, it is a clone/mirror of the drive. If we can ignore the free space on the source drive and the rest fits on the target volume, that's all I would want and expect a 'duplicate' to be just as if I had photocopied one page onto another. I do realise that you exclude some stuff from being copied over but could there not be an option to 'really' duplicate the volume as is?

[dnanian]

There could, yes, but there isn't. Instead, we're driven by a script, and we don't know what the script does until we're really doing it...