Strange Dock Behavior on Clone

[dnanian]

It's not tiresome, Bud: I'm just not sure how to best explain it. But I'll try.

When you're just backing things up, it doesn't matter what the name of the backup drive is. The files are being copied to it, but nothing's getting "resolved", as such, so the name of the destination volume doesn't matter. Naming it "Backup" (or whatever) is just fine.

The problem comes when you want to restore. If you boot from the clone, and it's got a name that's different from the original drive (under Jaguar, especially), aliases often will be resolved to the "path of least resistance" -- namely, the original volume name. So, you'll end up running programs from the original drive, rather than the current one.

So, what I'd recommend -- should it come time to restore -- is to boot from the backup drive and -- first thing -- rename the main drive to something other than Macintosh HD. Then, you should be able to run SuperDuper!, restore the drive, and rename it back without ending up running things from it you don't want run.

Note that, if you're using Smart Update to restore, this step is likely not necessary. It won't matter if files are busy on the drive, because Smart Update won't need to erase it. So, in that case, you can leave it as Macintosh HD.

Once you upgrade to Panther, this stuff becomes less necessary, as Panther doesn't seem to have the same problem.

On a slightly different note, I don't think renaming the drive caused you to have to repair it in Disk Warrior. I think that was something else entirely. You should be able to rename drives are pretty much any time, but remember that Aliases have the volume name in them, and they're going to try to "find" their original file. How that happens is different under Jaguar and Panther, and may be different again in Tiger. So, programs that store file references as aliases might operate slightly unusually after renaming -- or, in your previous case, booting from a clone.

Any clearer?