About to buy SuperDuper... if I can do this...

[bytte]

I'm about to buy SuperDuper, as I read very positive critiques about the program throughout the internet. Just a few questions though to make sure I don't throw away my money:

1. Can I make a bootable backup on an external HD without erasing my HD first? There's files on my HD that are not on my computer, so I don't want to erase these. Ideally, I'd like to create a folder on my external HD called "backup" and let SuperDuper make the backups in that folder.

2. If I make a bootable backup, is this backup some exotic file that cannot be opened by any program but SuperDuper? I had this with backup software before. I made a backup then wanted to restore a few folders on my computer that I had accidently deleted. So I'd like to be able to browse on my external HD to the folders and manually replace them on my computer if needed.

Thanks!

[dnanian]

1. Not one that you can directly boot from, no. But you can use a program like iPartition to divide the drive into multiple volumes, without erasing it. You can also store a backup that's bootable after restoration in a sparse image on the drive. See "Storing a backup alongside other files on a destination drive" in the User's Guide.

Note, though, that I recommend partitioning.

(You can't boot from a backup in a folder, anyway -- OSX has quite stringent requirements about where things must be stored.)

2. Absolutely not. Files are stored in a completely standard, OSX format. Nothing about the storage is specific to SuperDuper! at all... and that's quite deliberate.