my files written over as aliases during backup

[doofmaczemy]

Well, apparently, i don't know what i'm doing with aliases or Superduper.

I have my first drive linking to my second drive, via aliases, so that I can actually drag and drop larger files on my first drive into my second drive for storage.

The second drive is used for backup and storage only. But I did not know that during a backup, an alias on the first drive ...if it is the same name.. that it can write over the original file.

Now my original files are aliases on both drives.. wonderful, eh?

I was kind of hoping that Superduper would recognize the difference between a file and it's alias based on the fact that it's an alias, not by the name alone.

oh well.

So just a warning to alias users, don't change the name of an alias from
'mystuff alias' to 'mystuff' and back it up or you're probably going to screw yourself.

[doofmaczemy]

Let me guess, not one person,
in the history of computer use, has ever used the method in which
I describe, to back up their files, and therefore, they have absolutely no input on how to do it the right way..

[fmlogue]

I assume that no one has replied because no one has any idea as to what this means: "I have my first drive linking to my second drive, via aliases, so that I can actually drag and drop larger files on my first drive into my second drive for storage."
Since both drives can show up on the desktop, why cannot you just drag and drop files from your boot drive to the backup drive? And, if you use SuperDuper!, it is clear from the documentation, that it will erase your backup drive and then make the clone, so, as far as I can understand, you will loose your backups, and the aliases on your boot drive will now point to nothing. I can not imagine what will happen if you also have aliases on the boot drive that are the same name as real files on your boot drive, but I would assume that they would just be copied along with the files of the same name to the clone, but will no longer have any files to point to.
And I cannot imagine what Time Machine would do with the aliases, but I would fear that redundent recursion would fill up the Time Machine drive the first time Time Machine ran!

[doofmaczemy]

I could drag and drop files at any time, but if you drop them into alias folder representing the location on the second drive,
it conveniently updates to the second drive.. my goal being to clear up space on the first drive..

[dnanian]

Well, we do detect whether a symlink is going to replace a file with a symlink pointing to the same file, but we don't do this for aliases (which aren't directory entries, but rather real files, with contents). While it's unfortunate this happened to you, we certainly never indicated that we'd handle aliases in some magical fashion... they are, in the end, just files and we do indicate that files are going to be overwritten.

That said, I'll log the case you hit and we'll see if improvements might be able to be made at some point in the future.

[TMay]

Doof

Well, since you ask about the "right way," here's one way and it works, but I'm not sure it's "right."

I would recommend a partition of your second drive: create an "Archive" volume not affected by S/D. It will allow use of aliases on your boot drive just as you do now, without being affected by S/D.