backing up the boot drive

[Dewdman42]

two questions related to backing up my boot drive.

1 - If I am booted into the same drive that is being backed up, which things in particular should I worry about getting inconsistent file states when running SD against the current boot volume? Assume all user apps are sitting quiet. What if all user apps are shutdown but just the system is sitting idle mostly. Is that truly a reliable backup?

2 - Seems the best way is to boot from another volume in order to make sure the volume I want to backup is frozen. That being said, does anyone know of some scriptable way to switch boot volumes and reboot? I would then have the other boot volume have a startup script that can know how to check for status and startup superduper if appropriate, then switch the boot volume back and reboot again. Am I crazy to consider this? Basically want to try to schedule this.

[dnanian]

1. Yes, assuming that the 'quiet' apps have flushed their data (this does not include Parallels/VMWare, whose disk images aren't guaranteed to be good on-disk unless quit; same goes for Entourage). But if quit, yeah, should be just fine.

2. Yes, sure. But it's not necessary 99.9% of the time. Just not something I'd even consider for a regular backup.