[afterhours]

OK -- that solved it. The backup drive had been used by other systems and at other times. Using DU to erase the drive was sufficient to permit a full successful backup of the Tiger server.

Thanks for the suggestion to get me thinking again!

BTW, throughput: 8.5 Gb in just under 15 minutes, roughly 2 min/Gb. That's the complete drive cloned, not an incremental, with filters for all logs and cache (and the normal filters in a backup) in play. A second test (running just the normal smart backup without additional filters) evaluated 226k files, moved 380 Mb, took 3 minutes. Both drives are SATA in the Xserve bays, SD running in the Root account.

You've mentioned before that SD can be set to run scheduled, in the root account, and things progress just fine without the server console logged into any one account, right? We'll try it later tonight.