[dnanian]

Hey, snoopy67. Let me try to answer your questions.

1. Cron won't wake the computer. But, you can simply use the "Energy Saver" preference pane to set a wake-up time for a minute or so before Cron, and that'll wake right up.

SuperDuper! will put up a "waiting for mount" sheet until the drive spins up/is made available.

2. v1.x will prompt (and wait) if the drive isn't there. v2.x will exit with a failure.

3. You can use various shell commands in the applescript to re-mount a drive if you'd like. Search in the forums for a good example of this posted by a user.

Hope that helps!