So I'm getting ready to ship my MBP to Apple, and wanted to do a full backup then zero my drive prior to letting it leave my hands. (My usual strategy is to do a full backup "every so often", create an ASR image of the full backup, then do incrementals to the live partition.)
Prior to doing the full backup, I forgot to take an image of the live partition. Sloppy, late at night, etc. I might never have noticed this, were it not for source I/O errors
after I erased the live partition. Worse still, these errors were happening very early in the backup process, and I could see no way to have SD! continue past them. I didn't know I had a failing drive in addition to a bad DVI port.
After restoring my last "every so often" image to the live partition, the smartbackup/copy newer option was able to get all of my data. Apparently every one of the corrupted files was unchanged since the last successful backup. I'm a very happy man.
Now a quick question/feature request. Would it be possible to get a smart backup mode that can log I/O errors and keep trying subsequent files? In this case, if I'd had a newer corrupt file, I still would've wanted to copy the rest of my data and get a message telling me what I had lost. I was really dreading the prospect of writing that script myself, when I thought that was the feature I'd need
Thanks, and keep up the good work!
Geoff