newbie questions re: partitions, volumes, rotating backups

[ChrisJ]

Hi,

I just purchased SuperDuper! after researching and finding good reviews. The simplicity, reliability and versatility seem great. I also just got my first external drive (iomega 160GB Black Series FW-800).

After reading a bunch of the manual, there are a couple things I'm still not quite clear on. I was hoping someone here could help sort them out.

Page 4 suggests doing 'rotated' backups, but the idea isn't really elaborated on. How would this work in practice? Say you want to do Smart Updates daily for the current back-up but also want access to a week-old and a month-old version. This functionality isn't critical, but if easy then sure I'll do it.

Page 16 says, "In general, we strongly recommend that you store a backup on its own volume or partition, on a FireWire or internal drive that supports booting the Macintosh." What I'm not clear on is whether you can boot from a volume of a bootable drive (e.g. using the 'New Image' function of Disk Utility). That way I could store more than one bootable copy on my external drive (e.g. for doing rotations), or else keep data like large movie files backed up separately from the my main backup.

Finally, how are partitions different from volumes, and why can't the SandBox effect be accomplished using volumes? I like the idea of a SandBox, but I'm hesitant to partition my computer's drive. (And the manual for the drive I bought says they don't support multiple partitions.)

Thanks!
Chris