[vootsie]

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