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Old 02-13-2005, 06:11 PM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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Multiple points here, so I've edited and snipped some quotes here...

Quote:
Originally Posted by sliderule53
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There is nothing quite as exciting as erasing a bunch of your critical data (even with a backup), at least at my advanced age!
No kidding! Scary, but not as bad as you might think, eh?

Quote:
Originally Posted by sliderule53
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- 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.
Exactly right. They were pointing to the old locations.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sliderule53
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- 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?
Nope. Naming the backup drive something different is fine until you're going to boot from it.

Remember that SuperDuper! won't let you choose the boot drive as the destination of a backup...

Quote:
Originally Posted by sliderule53
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- 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?
Smart Update should be fine, unless there's not enough room... there are some situations where the "new" files appear before the "old" files are deleted. Give it a try... if you have a problem, then use Erase, then copy.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sliderule53
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- 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?
As long as you don't manually create aliases from the original drive to the Sandbox, it's safe to clone back. In other words, you should operate entirely on the Sandbox. When you want to update the main drive, you can use Smart Update and "Backup - all files" and clone from Sandbox to Macintosh HD. SuperDuper! will do the right thing... but ALWAYS make sure you have a full backup of Macintosh HD before you do this, just in case!
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