Avoiding File Evaluation

[morganclendanie]

Hi -
I use SuperDuper to back up my hard drive regularly, and it is wonderful. I am now trying to use it to do quick daily updates of key files to a flash drive to shuttle between two computers.

I have figured out how to limit the backup to just the files I want, but is there any way to limit what files SD "evaluates" as it makes my backups. Evaluating hundreds of thousands of files that don't need to be copied seems to take up a lot of time, and I would like these backups to go as quickly as possible. Is there a way to evaluate only certain files?

[dnanian]

Not at present, no. Sorry: we're generally designed to copy entire volumes...

[Frisco Tony]

Hi there... I just purchased SD after waiting for the Leopard release. I've been really impressed checking out the site and forums and blog while I've been waiting. Your responsiveness is incredible.

I'm also interested in decreasing the amount of time spent during evaluation. I have a relatively small set of files I'm interested in backing up -- /Users/me/Documents -- all my work stuff goes in there.

While I appreciate the benefits of having a fully bootable backup, I'm most interested in backing up the truly critical stuff as quickly as possible -- to ensure that I'll actually do it as often as I should.

Less frequently, I do anticipate backing up the whole volume, but I'd like to do the crucial files daily.

I'm finding that SD is taking what feels like a long time -- 16 minutes backing up around 3GB of files, and most of that time is spent evaluating a truly stunning number of files -- over a million. (I don't think I have too much crazy software installed -- Office, Photoshop, developer tools -- it blows me away that there are a million files on my machine!!!)

I don't know quite how I can convey enough how impressed I am with the simplicity of the software -- and I can totally understand if the answer is still: "Nope. That's not our main purpose," but is there any chance of getting improvements to the evaluation so that backups of small sets of files don't involve evaluating the entire volume?

I don't doubt that I'm in the minority, but surely many folks must be just backing up User folders like me, who could see an order of magnitude improvement in speed by pruning the evaluation list.

Thanks again for your hard work and a great product!

-tony

[dnanian]

It's something we're considering, Tony, but it's not extremely high priority: we try to encourage people to back up the whole drive.