Clarification of some instructions in the SD User Manual

[mkraft]

I'd appreciate clarification of the following items from the User Manual, & sorry for any novice questions (I am one):
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• Regarding restoring from a backup (p. 26): "drag the file back to its proper location using the Finder" . . .

Does "proper location" mean the parent folder (if a partial backup) and the Mac's internal HD if a full backup?
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• The "Restoring from a bootable backup" section (p. 27) only mentions booting from an internal partition or from an external Firewire drive.

I thought is was also possible to boot from a USB drive on Intel Macs (?)

Also, which Macs are/aren't "capable of starting up from Firewire"?
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• "Once the backup has been restored, restart your computer with Option held down, and select it as your startup volume." (p. 28)

What does 'it' refer to -- i.e., what should be selected as the startup volume -- 'it' appears to refer to the 'backup' but shouldn't 'it' be the Mac's internal hard drive (i.e., since the restart is occurring after the restore)?
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Thanks very much.

[dnanian]

The "proper location" means the place you want it to be.

Yes, you can start from USB drives on Intel Macs. Most Macs with FireWire can start up from FireWire. Some very old ones can't.

"It" is the internal drive in that case - i.e. start "the computer's drive" not the external, separate one.

[mkraft]

Originally Posted by dnanian

The "proper location" means the place you want it to be.

I'm not sure what you mean -- is there another 'proper location' to choose instead in the examples I gave? i.e.:

If you've done a full backup of the Mac's internal HD that you want to restore, you would drag the backup to the Mac's internal HD icon, wouldn't you? (What other choice would there be?)

And if you've backed up starting with a particular sub-folder (nothing above that subfolder) and were restoring that, you would have to be careful to drag the backup to the parent folder of that sub-folder -- otherwise the restoration would position all of the folders and files in the wrong path, wouldn't it? (Again, what other option would there be?)

[dnanian]

You can't restore a full backup by dragging it back. You can only restore selected files/folders that way.

And, yes, you restore the file back to where it should be. This is just starting Finder operation: I think you're overthinking it.