newbie questions re: partitions, volumes, rotating backups

[ChrisJ]

Thanks, Dave.

Originally Posted by dnanian

First, partition your destination into three (or use three different drives, or two, or whatever) -- one volume for the daily, one for the weekly, and one for the monthly.

Then, set up the three backups using our scheduler. One is daily -- so, all weeks and all days. One weekly -- all weeks, one day. One monthly -- one day, one week.

That's all there really is to it.

Hmm. But doing it this way, it seems you wouldn't have access to a week-old version right after the scheduled weekly backup. Same goes for the monthly. And the week the monthly backup happens, you wouldn't have access to a week-old OR a month-old version. Am I missing something?

Originally Posted by dnanian

You can boot from a volume of a bootable drive. A "normal" drive has one volume (partition). You can create more, of course... and all drives support partitions, it's not a hardware function.

When I said "volume," I meant volume in the sense of creating a new "Disk Image" in Disk Utility, and then clicking that to create a "Volume." That's what my Mac calls it when I click Apple-I for info. I assume this kind of volume is different from a partition? So instead of partitioning the external drive, can I create these kinds of volumes using Disk Utility, use SuperDuper! to create backups in each one, and then boot from those? That was my question.

Okay, thanks for your help,
Chris