Hi, Chad -- nice to see you here and, as I've said elsewhere, I'm quite sorry you lost your archive folder.
From a design perspective, a classic problem when there are multiple solutions available for a given task -- like "Backup" or "Copying" or whatever -- is that extensive experience with one can sometimes set up assumptions for the others.
It's difficult to put wording that breaks through that. After the fact, it can seem that one phrase would have made it clearer -- but without getting back in the original midset, it's really hard to know what would have worked. Of course, it's
awful that you lost data, and again I'm sorry it was unclear to you.
The
What's going to happen? section, in the screen shot, doesn't say "THE BACKUP DRIVE WILL BE ERASED" because it won't be. That's what "Erase, then copy" does. Instead, it says:
Quote:
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Smart Update will copy and erase what's needed to make (the destination volume) identical to your selections from (the source volume). The result will mimic "Erase (destination), then copy files from (source)", but will typically take a fraction of the time."
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So, it not only says it "copies and erases", emphasizing that the result will be identical to your selections from the source -- it also says "it's exactly like "Erase, then copy", but faster.
We then repeat this -- without the leading text, to "unbury" it and emphasize the action -- in the warning that comes up when you click "Copy".
For those who might read the User's Guide, I also give an explicit example of this case on page 42:
Quote:
Important Note
As we said above, the result of a Smart Update will be exactly what
you’d get if you chose Erase Sandbox, then copy files from
Macintosh HD. That means that any files “outside” the set of files
selected by the copy script will be erased.
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As I've indicated in our private conversations -- I'll revisit the wording again and do additional user testing in future versions to see if I can make further improvements: clearly, data loss is
not what we want for our users.
Thanks for the post and -- again -- sorry for your trouble.