non-heroic recovery FAIL! what should i have done?

[sumguy]

well, at the time i overwrote the super duper backup, i was pretty frustrated!

if i had lost the original drive, i would have done things differently. but i already knew the drive on my broken mac was still ok. i just had to wait several days for it to come back from the repair shop.

in the meantime, my goal was to have an exact copy of the drive, up to the time of the last hourly backup, to continue working, and then erase my mac's drive when it came back and transfer the working copy back to it. but since i was unable to find any method to obtain that exact copy - even with a full bootable backup plus hourly time machine backups! - i wasn't willing to erase the original drive. therefore the two backups i had were somewhat useless, and destroying one of them wasn't such a big deal.

if lost the drive now though, i still don't know what i'd do. i still don't feel that i have a workflow i'm happy with.

the manual "cherry picking" relies too much on my poor memory... what was i working on exactly? did i install or update any software? change any system or user preferences? yes, it would be better if i could manage to do daily super duper backups, but even then... it's frustrating to know i have (in theory) a full hourly backup, but am unable to update from it in an automated way. furthermore, the main "absolutely critical" thing for me is e-mail, and i'm now very skeptical about time machine's ability to restore it.

of course, the main frustration is time machine. i was quite surprised and disappointed to find out that a) there's no "smart update" type of feature to make your drive look like the backup, only a full restore that takes several hours; and b) that the full restore just doesn't seem to work right.

some people have said it's "normal" that mail has to re-import everything after a system restore. but apple's tech support pages don't say anything about it, only "follow the directions on the screen". i guess i should be talking about this in apple forums, but i'm also interested in feedback from people here, whether anyone else has managed a better solution.

thanks for your time and advice, it's appreciated!