A few newbie questions
 

I'm new to the Mac environment and have a few questions about SuperDuper. I just purchased a MBP with a 160Gb internal drive and now have about 60Gb used between the os and some of my migrated stuff. I have not yet installed SuperDuper so perhaps the answers to some of my questions will be self-evident to those of you already using the product.


1a) Say I take an external 1Tb FW drive (HFS+ format) and partition it into 10 partitions each of 100Gb (to allow for some additional things I expect to have on the MBP internal drive). I want to be able to save clone images as snapshots in-time, so I can revert to a previous snapshot even up to a year later. I presume that SuperDuper will allow me to choose which partition to 'clone' my internal drive to - is this correct?


1b) Let's assume that I have 10 clone images, one in each partition on the external drive. How would I tell SuperDuper which one clone to restore to the MBP?


1c) If I needed to boot into a specific clone image using target disk mode, can this be done? ie. internal drive dies and need to restore a specific clone to the new internal disk (maybe a dumb question to an experienced Mac user, sorry).


2) Does SuperDuper do a read-after-write compare to ensure that the target volume has an exact copy of the original files? If done, is it done as a separate 'verify' pass after the initial copy or at some other point in the backup process? I'm thinking of how Retrospect (PC version) offers an option to 'verify' a backup by doing a verification read comparison between files on the source and target. I didn't see anything in the SuperDuper user manual .pdf about this.


3) I see that SuperDuper has a 'Repair Permissions Before Copy' option. Will this repair permissions for a user whose user space is within a FileVault container? (backup will be run from a separate administrator account) Again, I'm new to the Mac so I'm not certain where/how file permissions are maintained.


Thanks for helping a newbie out.

1a. Yes. Though note that if you use partitions like this, if you lose the drive you lose everything on the drive. It's often better to have physical redundancy.

1b. By name...

1c. Assuming proper partitioning, yes.

2. No. Modern disk controllers flag I/O errors when the read or write occur, and we stop. Comparing "after" doesn't really accomplish anything.

3. They're not related at all. Note that FileVault (nicknamed VileFault) has its own set of issues, and requires special handling (see the User's Guide)... so whether you use it is up to you.