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Old 02-13-2005, 05:04 PM
sliderule53 sliderule53 is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2005
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Hi Dave,

I am happy to report that, after some finagling, I was able to transfer the data off the internal drive, convert to a single volume, and move the data back. I basically followed the procedure outlined in my first email and modified by your advice. I also checked both disks with DiskWarrior before proceeding. There is nothing quite as exciting as erasing a bunch of your critical data (even with a backup), at least at my advanced age! FYI, here are a few notes and questions on what happened in the process:
- Many of the dock icons for each of four users lost their links during this process, probably because some of the icons referred to applications that were not on the boot partition to start with. It was easy to manually restore the icons.
- iPhoto and iTunes were able to find their libraries again with some help from me.
- I did this process with the external drive having the same name as the internal boot drive as you suggested. They had different drive icons on the desktop, but after moving the data back to the single internal volume with SuperDuper they had the same internal drive icon in the finder window drive pane list. This was confusing and potentially dangerous so I changed the external drive name. Is there any problem with this?
- The first time I attempted to make a safety clone (sharing users and apps) the process failed after the 20GB Sandbox volume filled up before the copy was done. This apparently happened because I had games and music and photo files in folders at the top level of the internal drive, a legacy from my screwy 4-volume organizational system. When I moved these folders into the Users/Shared folder and explained to iPhoto and iTunes what had happened, I was able to successfully safety clone to the external Sandbox drive, using only 4GB.
- Of course, now my internal drive has a different organizational structure than my full external backup so I will backup again when I am satisfied that everything is cool and stable. Will a Smart Update be sufficient here, or should I erase and copy since things have been moved around so much?
- I am now running off the safety clone and everything seems fine. I guess my primary concern is figuring out how to keep the safety clone and the master internal boot volume synchronized. You talk about installing applications first in the clone and later in the boot volume, but it might be problematic to keep track of all new applications in a four-user system. You warn about the dangers of copying your safety clone back over the original system, but it seems like this might be the most efficient way to really capture the changes made to the Sandbox. Any advice here or details on how to do this safely?

Thanks very much for your help, Dave, and your contributions to an excellent program! Now, when you guys fold in scheduling, I will be able to throw away my work copy of Retrospect!
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