About to buy SuperDuper... if I can do this...
 

I'm about to buy SuperDuper, as I read very positive critiques about the program throughout the internet. Just a few questions though to make sure I don't throw away my money:

1. Can I make a bootable backup on an external HD without erasing my HD first? There's files on my HD that are not on my computer, so I don't want to erase these. Ideally, I'd like to create a folder on my external HD called "backup" and let SuperDuper make the backups in that folder.

2. If I make a bootable backup, is this backup some exotic file that cannot be opened by any program but SuperDuper? I had this with backup software before. I made a backup then wanted to restore a few folders on my computer that I had accidently deleted. So I'd like to be able to browse on my external HD to the folders and manually replace them on my computer if needed.

Thanks!

1. Not one that you can directly boot from, no. But you can use a program like iPartition to divide the drive into multiple volumes, without erasing it. You can also store a backup that's bootable after restoration in a sparse image on the drive. See "Storing a backup alongside other files on a destination drive" in the User's Guide.

Note, though, that I recommend partitioning.

(You can't boot from a backup in a folder, anyway -- OSX has quite stringent requirements about where things must be stored.)

2. Absolutely not. Files are stored in a completely standard, OSX format. Nothing about the storage is specific to SuperDuper! at all... and that's quite deliberate.