Please Help A New User
 

After a nightmare experience with the death of my hard drive and a lousy backup strategy, I am ready to start using SD and a new LaCie D2 drive to clone my system. (I'm running Mac OS 10.4.3 on a G5 Dual 2 GHz). My intention is to create a bootable copy of my entire drive, so that I can avoid the pain & suffering of losing data and re-installing everything.

I've read the documentation, but I'm not clear on a couple of basic things:

First, I've been told that it's not a great idea to keep my external drive mounted all the time. (I keep it connected via firewire, but not mounted) If I were to schedule Smart Update backups to occur during the night, will SD mount the backup drive? and unmount after completion? Or do I have to remember to mount it myself? Or, is there actually NO reason I shouldn't keep the drive mounted all the time? What do most people do?

Second, should I name the clone the same name as my source (internal) drive?

Thanks so much for any help & advice.

Vootsie

Well, vootsie, I can't think of why it's a bad idea to keep your drive connected, if you allow spindown to occur. If it's got a decent fan in it, and it's spinning down, it's basically idle. Why not leave it connected and mounted?

SD! will not mount a local drive if it's not present -- you'd have to do it yourself, or modify the scheduling script to locate and mount, then eject, the drive.

In general, it's best to name the drive the same as the internal drive, but it's not really *required* if you don't boot from it. (The reason is that aliases store the name of the drive along with the path to the file, even on the boot drive. As such, those aliases will preferentially resolve to the original drive they came from -- which means you'll sometimes be opening files and applications on the original, rather than the backup.)

More questions...
 

Thanks so much for replying. Sorry to be a pain, but...

What do you mean by "if you allow spindown to occur"?

Also, you wrote: "modify the scheduling script to locate and mount, then eject, the drive." Where can I learn how to do this?

Spindown is set in Energy Saver -- there's a checkbox that says "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible". This might actually have no effect on FireWire drives which sleep regardless...

There's a good post about mount/unmount here, and a discussion of the scheduling scripts here. Hope that helps!