Mount/Unmount

[sjk]

Hi Paul,

I have a few comments since my backup strategy is similar to yours ...

Originally Posted by ptaylor

The Weekly Full Backup is a "delete destination and copy all files" type of backup to a partition (so it can be bootable).. I want this scheduled for once per week, like Sunday nights

The Daily Full Backup is a "delete destination and copy all files" type of backup to a sparse image. I want this backup to run Monday nights.

If the destination volume is empty or its data isn't radically different than on the source volume you might want to use Smart Update. When the destination is empty Smart Update is equivalent to Erase then Copy.

When someone recently asked, Dave responded that it wasn't necessary to use Erase then Copy after using Smart Update for awhile. That convinced me there's no reason to keep my original Saved Session scripts that use Erase then Copy. If necessary, I'll use Disk Utility to erase a "radically different" destination volume in addition to creating new sparse images.

The Daily Incremental Backup is a "smart backup" to the sparse image mentioned in the "Daily Full" script. This script should run Tuesday - Saturday...

If my logic above makes sense, you could use a single Smart Update script for both your Daily Full and Daily Incremental backups.

However(!), doing it that way will gradually consume more space on the sparse image and the physical volume it's on. To avoid that, I occasionally run "hdiutil compact /path/to/name.sparseimage" from an after copy customization shell script to shrink the sparse image. So, there's certainly an advantage to your method of doing a weekly Erase then Copy on the sparse image to shrink it.

Either way requires multiple scripts. Since I'm more comfortable with shell than AppleScript I've chosen that approach for now. I'm wondering if Automator might be helpful in the future although I won't be upgrading to Tiger for at least another month.

Using this method, I should always have two backups... One from Sunday night on a physical partition that I can boot to in an emergency, and one that was taken the previous night (on the sparse image)... (I'll probably also script something to copy off the sparse disk image once a month or so to a network attached drive)...

What I do is use Smart Update to occasionally update "remote backup" sparse images from the "master backup" images since it's faster (on my 100Mbps home LAN) than copying the full images.

Anyhow, this brings me to my situation... When I run the Weekly Full Backup script, it attempts to mount my "daily" sparse image, but since neither it nor the drive housing it are mounted, it can't. That hangs the backup script... I don't have this issue when running either of the "Daily" scripts, because the sparse image is mounted by the script prior to SuperDuper starting up.

So, how can I stop SuperDuper from trying to mount the "daily" sparse disk image on it's own?

Glad to finally hear from someone else who's encountered that mount snafu. I've used Dave's suggested resolution, too.

That brings up the topic of suggested improvements for volume and image management, which gets more involved than I have time and space for here. And Shirt Pocket is plenty busy right now with Tiger compatibility issues and the v2 release so I don't want to distract them from those priorities.