[dnanian]

Well: Deja Vu and CCC use psync to do scheduled backups. But, at least in the case of Deja Vu, certain versions of it did not check to see if the drive was mounted before actually starting the copy.

As such, they'd copy to the mount point, in /Volumes, and if the drive wasn't there, the contents of the backup would be copied into a folder rather than to the drive (since both basically look the same).

This can also happen when a drive fails -- drops off the bus -- during a backup operation. The OS might not indicate a problem has occurred quickly enough, and then the mount point which -- again -- looks like a folder, would get created like any other.

The end result is the same, regardless: your data ends up in a folder in /Volumes, rather than on the actual drive you thought it was being copied to.

I hope that helps to explain...