Backing up a failing hard drive
 

I use SD for an regular timed backup to an external FireWire drive and am very happy with its performance in that role, but I had to use it "in anger" for the first time yesterday on a failing hard drive in my wife's iMac, and then the performance was not quite so stellar. The trouble is that as you explained in another thread you take a very cautious conservative approach over disk errors. There were 6 files on the HD which could not be read and each time SD aborted the backup. The first time I made a copy script from the Backup all Files script, added the name of the file that could not be copied to an ignore command and ran a Smart Update. I then had to repeat this another 5 times, and each time it took Smart Update at least 10 minutes before it got back to the position it was in before and started doing some real work. It is a shame that SD does not have an option to continue missing out the current (and maybe any future) unreadable file that it may encounter, for this circumstance, where one's priority is to rescue as much information as possible rather than create a bootable backup.

In the end I did manage to rescue everything important, but it took a much longer time than I would have wished. I hope this is addressed in v 2.0. In all other respects I love the app, and am a very happy user.

I understand the problem you're having, but the reason we don't allow this is that it's a bad idea to ignore errors on the drive and continue. Each error needs to be addressed, whether by manually repairing the file or changing the script.

I recognize it's a pain, but SD! isn't a "scavenger" tool -- it's a backup tool, and needs to be used preventively rather than reactively, if that make sense.

We'll be investigating other methods of doing error recovery during the 2.x series, but for now v2.0 stops as v1.x does... sorry if it's a pain that way, but it really is safest.