a very minor issue
 

Greetings, I have used this wonderful product for about two weeks now, making Smart update backups to my external drive every other night.

Up until tonight, I would make the clone and reboot from the external for a "test drive", and all would seem well. Tonight when I booted to the external, all was well EXCEPT my personal desktop photo would not appear on startup. Instead it was one of the generic Apple desktop images. I then re-cloned to see if for some reason that would fix it, but no joy.

Any ideas about this? As I mentioned, it's a very minor issue I can certainly live with. Thanks in advance.

Hm. That's strange!

Is your backup named the same as your source? If not, try booting back to the source, renaming the backup to the same thing, and Smart Updating. Then, boot to the backup.

Thank you. No, my backup was not named the same as my source. However, I followed your suggestions, and all was well regarding the desktop image. Can you tell me why? I would rather my backup drive simply be called "backup", rather than "Macintosh HD". Would this also explain why yesterday, when I downloaded the new Diskwarrior update (version 3.0.3), and dragged it to my Application/Utilities folder to replace version 3.0.2, and then made a smart clone - the clone upon reboot failed to recognize version 3.0.3? Version 3.0.2 was still present. I emailed the Diskwarrior people, and they said it must have been a SuperDuper problem. Do you have any insight on this?

Thanks again for your help.

Hi, dirt farmer.

The backup drive naming issue has to do with Aliases. Aliases contain the name of the volume, as well as the path and name of the file. So, when one is used (resolved), it first tries to find the volume it "points to", then the path, then the file.

If the backup drive is named differently than the source, and is available when the alias is resolved, it will point to the file on the original drive instead of the equivalent file on the backup.

If, however, it's named the same, the alias will preferentially resolve to the first volume with the name -- the boot volume.

So, it's not so much a problem when you're backing up, but when you decide you want to boot from the backup.

Regarding copying Disk Warrior: we've never seen a case, in all the time SuperDuper! has been out, where a file that should have been copied wasn't copied. I can't explain what you've seen, but if you'll send your SuperDuper!.log to support, I'll try to see if there's a a potential explanation in there.

Macintosh HD
 

This means we have to call the clone backup of the Macintosh HD - also Macintosh HD. To be sure it will work !!!!

Before you boot from it, that's best -- if the original drive is available when you boot from the backup.

Would you suggest uniquely renaming the original boot volume right before booting from the same-name-as-original cloned volume? Is there any "which volume(s) to rename when" info about this I've missed? Thanks.

No, I wouldn't do that. Rename the full backup you're booting from to the same name as the source.

(The whole point of this is to handle Aliases and other things that explicitly reference the volume name.)

My reason for also renaming the original boot volume was to minimize the chance of it still being unintentionally accessed in some unexpected way after booting the backup. So, you're saying that renaming the backup with the original volume name is sufficient to avoid that possibility (other than some "obscure" direct UUID volume reference that ignored its name)? [edit: just noticed you recently answered that in another thread]

Yes, it should be. You can take both steps, of course, should you wish to.