2.5's super-slick
 

Bravo! What a relief to have the Leopard version here finally and work so well. I've been backing up all along with the old version, which had problems with Leopard in spots (sorry, couldn't resist), but the new one turns out a clone that's indistinguishable from the original and boots every bit as quickly. And all without discombobulating Time Machine in the least.

When I say it's indistinguishable from the original, I mean the original minus the empty folders that the previous version has been throwing up since Leopard's arrival. My internal drive for the past couple of months since its upgrade to OS10.5 has been showing extra folders and folder aliases with names such as "dev" and "net" at the same level as the "Applications", "System" and "Users" folders. All these phantom folders have been empty.
When I finally got my hands on the new SuperDuper! this morning and cloned the internal drive afresh with it, the internal still had the phantoms, but SuperDuper! ignored them. It produced a clean copy with only the files that should have been there.

I take it there's no reason why I shouldn't now just kill the phantoms on the internal drive?

whoops! phantom folders still here
 

Sorry. Got myself confused, because I was writing this while using the backup drive as my startup. SuperDuper! is once again correctly putting it up at the top of the screen in that case, which the old version couldn't do under Leopard. I got muddled into thinking the other hard drive (the internal HD) was the clone.

OK, here's the deal. The new SuperDuper! does produce a clone that's far quicker to boot than the ones the old version produced under Leopard, and the clones it makes do take their proper position on the screen now. However, there are still phantom folders. I thought at first that SuperDuper! 2.5 knew enough to ignore the previous phantoms and not copy them. Not quite. The phantoms are still there -- three of them: Dev, Home and Net, all empty, none of them aliases now, and all of them at the level of the System and Users folders, as I said -- BUT THEY MIGRATE!

If I have the backup drive as startup, the phantoms show up on the internal drive, which is below it on the desktop. If I restart, booting from the internal drive, the phantoms disappear from there and show up on the backup. Reboot again, and they migrate back.

How weird is that?

So the question remains: Can I kill 'em? And if I kill 'em on whichever drive has 'em at the moment, will the darned things reappear the next time I boot from there?

Don't touch them, Doug: they're important system folders. They're visible because the system is not returning the 'invisible' attribute when we request their metadata...