multiple scheduled backups?

[Dan Lester]

OK, I did some more testing, and it's pretty weird. It is NOT an issue of scheduled back-to-back backups not working. It's an issue of ONE scheduled backup not working. My two backups are (1) to a Western Digital Passport SSD, and (2) a Western Digital Sabrent spinning disk drive. When I schedule both, only the SSD backup happens. The Sabrent JUST DOESN'T happen. Nothing happens at that scheduled time. SuperDuper doesn't even open. When I do manual backups, each backs up properly. For some reason I cannot successfully SCHEDULE the Sabrent drive.

In Disk Utility, when I look at these disks, they all seem to be set up the same way. GUID partition map, APFS. What's going on???

[dnanian]

What is the name of the drive that's not working?

[Dan Lester]

OK. I figured it out. Geez Louise. Many days ago I had to rebuild my system, and my internal hard drive is normally named "Shadowfax". After a few days I noticed that it actually somehow got named "shadowfax". I corrected it (figuring it was just a very very minor correction) but only after I had scheduled some SuperDuper copies! So, the SuperDuper Scheduled Copies script was trying to copy "Shadowfax" to one disk, and "shadowfax" to another. But "shadowfax" didn't exist anymore! I never deleted and reentered all the SuperDuper scheduled copies, which was dumb. I just edited the time/date on the schedules that were already there, so that internal boot disk name change didn't get fixed. As a result, when the SuperDuper scheduling script tried to copy from "shadowfax", it wasn't there, and SuperDuper just didn't do anything (and no errors appeared). When you want to do a copy from the main SuperDuper window, of course, what appears there is the properly named "Shadowfax", because that's the disk that it sees there, and the copy works fine. That's why manual backups were all successful to both disks. Now that the naming is fixed in Scheduled Copies, everything works properly, and back-to-back scheduled copies work perfectly, like you said they should. Thank you!

But I might suggest that when SuperDuper can't find a disk it is being asked to schedule a copy to or from, it ought to pop up some error! Very sorry about all this, but I think this lesson might be a useful one.

[dnanian]

That's actually not likely what was going on, since we don't look for drives by name (save to mount them). Rather, you rebuilt your system and the source drive no longer matched the low-level ID it had before, and you had the schedule set to not notify when drives are missing. So, it didn't...

[Dan Lester]

How do you set SuperDuper up to notify when drives are missing? I've never noticed that option.

[dnanian]

It's right in the schedule sheet...the last option.

[Dan Lester]

Oh my, so it is. Thank you. Never noticed that. I guess I have to wonder why that is an option. Why wouldn't you always want to know if disks are missing?