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Old 06-03-2004, 07:51 AM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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Sorry it took me a little while to respond to this, rcatrambone: it hit the board a bit late last night, at least in my timezone.

Anyway, it sounds to me like you want to "sync" a specific folder, using Smart Update, between two computers.

At present, SuperDuper doesn't let you "restrict" a Smart Update operation to only affect a given folder on a drive. While this probably isn't a big deal when you copy *to* the external drive (since you can have it copy /Users/rcatrambobe/Documents), it matters a lot when you copy to the home computer.

Here's why: Smart Update is defined to accomplish the same thing as "Erase, then copy", except by performing as few copies and deletes as possible, rather than by actually erasing and re-copying the entire drive. Anything that wouldn't be on the drive after an Erase, then copy will be erased.

That means that restricting the clone to a given folder (or folder hierarchy) will cause all the other folders on the drive to be removed. Which probably isn't what you want.

So -- how can you accomplish what you're trying to do?

Well, there are two other "During copy" choices that might work for you: Copy Newer and Copy Different. Those do pretty much what they say -- copy newer (or different) files from the source to the destination. What they don't do is erase. So, you can take a given folder hierarchy and "merge" it, copying only changed files.

Two things, though: files deleted on one device won't get deleted from the other, and the folders (and userids) would have to be named the same, from the root on down, on both machines.

There are other options, of course, including editing directly on the external drive (and making that a bit more transparent with an alias/symlink)... but I don't know exactly what would be acceptable to you, so I don't want to suggest something without knowing a bit more about your workflow.

There are some changes planned that would allow you to use Smart Update in this kind of situation, but I don't know when those are going to actually be released... as you might expect, the list is pretty long, and time is short.

Hope that helps!
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