[dnanian]

If you're cloning back, I don't quite see why you're copying off Desktop/Documents, because they never 'move' -- they're on the original drive anyway. And you should always be doing a regular backup of the base drive.

As far as getting the system.log from the base drive when you're on the sandbox, you'd use Finder's "Go To Folder" command to open

/Volumes/the-base-drive-name/private/var/log

system.log is in there.