SuperDuper! post-copy action

[techno]

I love SuperDuper! and have been using it for years. The SmartUpdate feature is my favorite part of the robust application. I have one suggestion for SD, and I'd love to hear others' thoughts.

For me, backups often take about four hours, so I don't always know what I want SuperDuper! to do upon the successful completion of a clone. I wish the option could be a drop-down menu that remains modifiable after the backup process begins. I have often canceled in the middle of a backup (making it useless) or stayed up unnecessarily long to facilitate a manual shut down when the backup finally does end.

It seems like it would be straightforward to add, and could even be an advanced option is Mr. Nanian wants to avoid presenting this choice to all users. Thanks!

[pjg37363]

Look under options "upon successful completions"!! What else could you want?

[dnanian]

Why would stopping in the middle of a backup, changing the option you want, then resuming with Smart Update make that backup useless?

[techno]

I usually find that it's difficult to find the time to let SD and my maintenance programs run, so after a week or two of a canceled update (like in last night's example), when I run a Smart Update, only a small fraction of the drive doesn't need updating. I had about 40GB out of 400GB of data not need updating, despite the fact that I believe the majority of the data on my drive didn't change. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but the Smart Update took five hours over FireWire 400 and was itself a Smart Update of an Erase and Install that originally got halfway through.

Big thanks as always to Mr. Nanian for the quick replies on his forum. Keep up the great work on some of the best Mac software out there!

[techno]

Originally Posted by pjg37363

Look under options "upon successful completions"!! What else could you want?

What I meant to say was that I want the ability to change whatever I select when I'm in the middle of a backup. Sometimes I chose "Quit SuperDuper!" but then after it begins to take a while I'll see that I need to go to sleep, wishing I had chosen Shut Down. Other times I'll choose Restart when I need to keep working on the computer as soon as SD! finishes, and restarting interrupts my workflow.

[dnanian]

It's certainly weird to have 360GB out of 400GB change at any given time. Does the same thing with back to back complete smart updates?

(BTW, I understood what you meant/wanted, techno - I think pjg37363 just didn't quite get what you were saying.)

[techno]

By that do you mean running a Smart Update again right after a Smart Update successfully finishes?

[dnanian]

Exactly, yes.

[techno]

So I ran a Smart Update, and then immeadiately ran another one without doing anything more than continuing to surf the web and listen to music.

Here's what it told me the second time around:

Files evaluated: 940,247
Files copied: 276
Storage evaluated: 416.2GB
Storage already up to date: 410.1GB
Storage copied: 1.1GB
Elapsed time: 17 minutes, 53 seconds

(And that was with Spotlight trying to backup the mounted disk image.)

Anyone know why the logs don't add up correctly? I thought the already up-to-date files and the copied files would total up to equal the storage evaluated, but they're a few gigabytes off.

I take it that copy time is about normal? Maybe last time I did something like rename a large folder without knowing. Does that cause SuperDuper! to re-backup everything in that folder? I know the Finder can preserve aliases if one of the files or folders is renamed, but can SD just change its directory when doing a Smart Update or does it just see that a folder is there that wasn't before and back it up from scratch?

I'm running SuperDuper! 2.6.2 on a 2.0GHz MacBook with 2GB of RAM on Mac OS X 10.6.4.

[dnanian]

The ignored or preserved files (eg spotlight data) are evaluated but neither up to date nor copied. Copy time seems fine. And yes, renaming folders would cause the data to be recopied and the old folder to be removed... we have no idea you renamed - we just see a different folder name.