SD no longer recognizing backup drive

[orionxl]

This started about two weeks ago I believe but since I backup at night I didn't notice at first. SD no longer recognizes my backup drive though it's functioning just fine. I went to do a manual vice scheduled backup and the backup drive is greyed out in the drop down menu. The other two drives I have are listed as backup options. Both the boot drive and the backup drive are SATA drives, 500GB Western Digital. I updated today but still no joy.

Mac Pro

[dnanian]

Are you running from the backup drive? CHeck in the "About this Mac" panel...

[orionxl]

This makes no sense to me. Apparently at some point my Mac booted into the backup image instead of the startup disk and since they were identical I didn't notice at all. I have literally never booted into the backup before for any reason at all. I can't image how and I would never have discovered it if I hadn't spent a few hours working off the Vista drive today and then restarting in OSX from there. Went straight for my startup drive instead of the backup.

Good call. Pulling the last few weeks worth of files off the backup now though that moniker is somewhat of a misnomer at this point. Superduper now looks like it should when I open it.

Thanks dude. Thanks much. And...thank you....Windows *gulp* Vista.

[orionxl]

By way of additional followup it looks like I've lost literally two weeks of data off of BOTH drives. No idea how this could have happened and I'm no longer sure what's up. Files I deleted circa 1 week ago have reappeared on BOTH drives which is just bizarre but the backup drive also has a few files that I created only today.

[dnanian]

I have no idea... are you sure you're looking at the right place? Remember, the buttons in the sidebar of Finder always go to the startup drive, not to the "selected" drive. If you want to look at paths on a different drive, you have to drill down them by 'hand'.

[davep]

Dave -- Here's an idea for you so that people will know when they've inadvertently booted up from their backup drive...

Could SuperDuper! do something to the appearance of the backup drive, like make the desktop yellow with black stripes or use a red system font or flash a big onscreen warning dialog, etc.? Of course, whatever you decide could be turned off via a preference.

I realize that the SD! copy is an exact copy, but didn't I read somewhere that it's not really an *exact* copy because SD! skips copying some caches and temp files? So since SD! knows which is the target, can't it mark the target as the backup?

[dnanian]

It's not something I think should be done, Dave, no. Of course, a user can use the 'after copy' shell script to adjust the backup any way they see fit...