A "public beta" mount/unmount surprise for you.

[Pendragon]

Works as advertised on a DP 800/1.25 GB RAM, 10.4.6. Thanks Dave!

[dnanian]

OK, one success. That's good, at least!

[Michael@wengam]

This worked OK on my Quicksilver 733 Mhz PowerMac with 1 Gb RAM, OS 10.4.6, a Seritek/1S2 controller card and two 250 GB Hitachi SATA drives. A Smart Backup from the first partition on one drive to the matching partition on the other (originally unmounted) disk took 14 minutes to transfer only 300 MB of changed files out of 74 GB. After the backup the second drive got unmounted and the computer put itself to sleep. Just what I want! Thank you.

Q1: Is there an Applescript or something I can load as a startup item to automatically unmount the second drive for every day use unless SuperDuper calls for it?

Q2: I also want to automatically backup my laptop drive to a sparse disk image on the third partition of the desktop's startup drive. Is this the thing you are warning won't work? This partition is normally mounted anyway because it is on the startup disc. Following the instructions in the manual, I can have both computers scheduled to wake up at the same time, then SuperDuper will automatically connect to the desktop, mount the disk image and run a Smart Backup. SuperDuper on the laptop then unmounts the sparse image and sleeps the laptop, but it doesn't 'release' the file sharing connection to the desktop, and the desktop therefore will not sleep. As a result I find the desktop awake with all fans running the following morning and the laptop sleeping. My question is: how can I force the laptop to disconnect from file sharing to the desktop when the scheduled Smart Backup has finished? I suppose I could tell SuperDuper to completely shut down the laptop after the backup, but is there another way that would leave the laptop just sleeping?

[dnanian]

Hi, Michael.

If you want to create a little program that will unmount a drive, you'd use Script Editor to create an Applescript application with the following content:

tell application "Finder" to eject disk "the-disk-name"

Save that as an application, and then set it as a startup item.

For your 2nd issue, you can save a disk image to a local drive that's mounted, no problem. The case I'm warning about is that we won't mount/unmount the volume an image is stored on.

Finally, what you could do for your last issue is schedule the copy, then uncheck the checkbox. Locate the scheduled copy in the Library/Application Support/SuperDuper!/Scheduled Copies folder. Control-click the settings package there, and show package contents. Edit the "Copy Job.applescript" with script editor, and add an eject statement for the network job in the "after copy" area at the top. It'd look just like the above, but with the network drive name.

Save the script, then go back to SuperDuper! and double-click the entry in the Scheduled Copies window. Check the box, and we'll compile the script for you. That should do it.

[Michael@wengam]

Thanks, Dave. My applescript, saved as an application, ran without any visible result. But the Finder menu command "Eject volume-name" is anyway greyed out.

tell application "Finder"
eject "volume-name"
end tell

I can eject/unmount the volume by dragging its disk icon to the trash, however.

[dnanian]

For "volume-name", you want to actually substitute the name of the volume you're trying to eject...

[Michael@wengam]

I think I have done that in my actual script (where OSX_silver_B is one of the partitions I want to unmount):

tell application "Finder"
	eject "OSX_silver_B"
end tell

[Jonathan Strait]

Terrific! Worked great! Now I don't have to concern myself with whether or not I remembered to remount volumes...

When checking SD! schedule and logs after doing test backup I did get an error on SD start up:
"SuperDuper! cannot find target volume "(null)". Please attach or mount the volume named "(null)". If you can't find this volume, or it was erased outside SuperDuper!, click Cancel."

Clicking "cancel" brings you to the SD panel with everything greyed out.

Don't remember having this problem before. Could view the schedule even with volumes unmounted (I think?) Anyway, not a problem since mounting the volumes again brings everything back to normal.

Thanks for this, J

[dnanian]

That error is pretty much expected -- you can prevent it using SuperDuper!'s preferences.

Thanks for the feedback!