Open up the settings file...
 

In recently investigating a bug with drive names that have accented characters, I read through the settings file SuperDuper stored.

The file is easy to understand and quite complete, but there is no way for someone to edit it. Especially, the SDTargetVolume and SDSourceVolume data elements. While the binary data is certainly effective, it nonetheless is not at all editable. And that's unfortunate, because it would simply be more effective for me to type in a few config files than to have bunches of binary data.

Is there some way to represent in XML the complex data you have stored there? It would be helpful for those of us that may want to tweak our backup routines to the n-th degree :D

At present, no: frankly, we'd prefer it if you didn't attempt to modify these files, since their format is internal and not guaranteed to be maintained version-to-version...

My motivation
 

Seeing as I found a bug in the accented characters, I had to.

For my setup, I have set up 15 different jobs:

• A user documents backup for each weekday of the week to Backup 1, 1st and 3rd weeks of the month (5 jobs)
• A user documents backup for each weekday of the week to Backup 2, 2nd and 4th weeks of the month (5 jobs)
• A complete backup of the internal HD to Backup 1, 1st and 3rd weeks of the month (1 job)
• A complete backup of the internal HD to Backup 2, 2nd and 4th weeks of the month (1 job)
• A complete disk backup, once a week to a bootable Firewire drive (1 job)
• Once a week backup of my virtual machines directory (on an eSATA array) to Backup 1, 1st and 3rd weeks of the month (1 job)
• Once a week backup of my virtual machines directory (on an eSATA array) to Backup 2, 2nd and 4th weeks of the month (1 job)

Considering I had 2 500GB drives fail in the past 6 months, I've committed to having a two week archive that provides complete snapshots, daily incrementals, and off-site recovery. So, that's the reason for the request.

BTW--if you have a published schema and namespace, it would be very simple to support extensions to the XML structure without worrying about incompatibilities. Just a suggestion.

Understood, of course...