Questions from another newbie trying to get it right.

[steve112]

Dave-

I am only now responding to your reply because I have been working with SD! to see if that made things clearer in my mind. It has, but I still have some questions.

1. Naming the backup volume. I questioned whether naming the backup volume the same as the original volume wouldn't be confusing. You explained that "we generally recommend that -- before you boot from it -- a backup volume should be named the same as the source" in order to allow aliases to resolve properly (by which I believe you mean to the backup volume). And on 6-12-05, you gave a similar reply to an inquiry from rayc 325: "The basic rule is this: If you plan on booting from a copy, and the original drive is going to be available, name the copy the same as the original (unless it's a safety clone)."

I guess my further question comes down to this: Is the snapshot on page 11 a little misleading? It shows making a copy from Macintosh HD to Backup, and that the system will reboot from Backup. But if you were trying to avoid the alias problem, wouldn't the destination volume have to also be called Macintosh HD? And when you do that, the text in "What's going to happen?" becomes confusing because all the references to Backup become references to Macintosh HD. And it gets even more confusing when you have redundant backups, such as on an internal HD and on an external FW drive. It's a little unnerving when you're worried that you are going to make a mistake.

Similarly, if you go to Startup Disk window under System Preferences, or to the on-the-fly window that you get when you hold the Option key down while rebooting, it becomes sheer guesswork when you try to select the start up volume because the original volume and the destination volumes are indistinguishable. I tried to solve this by assigning different color labels to the different drives, but they quickly changed themselves so that all of the drives had the same color as the original.

2. How to use the Safety Clone when upgrading from Panther to Tiger. I am preparing to install Tiger on a PowerBook, and have already created a bootable backup of the original Panther volume on a partition on an external FW drive. I have also created a Safety Clone of the Panther drive on a separate partition on the external drive, and at the moment that is what I am booted from. I have assumed I should reboot to the original Panther drive before installing Tiger. But then it occurred to me that perhaps I could install Tiger leaving the system booted from the Safety Clone, and that there might be some advantage in doing so. What would you advise me to do?

3. Ambiguous language on p. 25? It wasn't a big deal, but in the third sentence of the 2nd paragraph on that page I wasn't always sure what "it" was referring to: When you want to add [one of] those [more complex applications] to the original volume, you select [it] [the original volume] as your startup drive, restart your Macintosh, and install [it] [the more complex application] using its installer.

Thanks,

Steve