A "public beta" mount/unmount surprise for you.

[Michael@wengam]

This worked OK on my Quicksilver 733 Mhz PowerMac with 1 Gb RAM, OS 10.4.6, a Seritek/1S2 controller card and two 250 GB Hitachi SATA drives. A Smart Backup from the first partition on one drive to the matching partition on the other (originally unmounted) disk took 14 minutes to transfer only 300 MB of changed files out of 74 GB. After the backup the second drive got unmounted and the computer put itself to sleep. Just what I want! Thank you.

Q1: Is there an Applescript or something I can load as a startup item to automatically unmount the second drive for every day use unless SuperDuper calls for it?

Q2: I also want to automatically backup my laptop drive to a sparse disk image on the third partition of the desktop's startup drive. Is this the thing you are warning won't work? This partition is normally mounted anyway because it is on the startup disc. Following the instructions in the manual, I can have both computers scheduled to wake up at the same time, then SuperDuper will automatically connect to the desktop, mount the disk image and run a Smart Backup. SuperDuper on the laptop then unmounts the sparse image and sleeps the laptop, but it doesn't 'release' the file sharing connection to the desktop, and the desktop therefore will not sleep. As a result I find the desktop awake with all fans running the following morning and the laptop sleeping. My question is: how can I force the laptop to disconnect from file sharing to the desktop when the scheduled Smart Backup has finished? I suppose I could tell SuperDuper to completely shut down the laptop after the backup, but is there another way that would leave the laptop just sleeping?