SD and Time Machine

[padmavyuha]

Hello there

I have an enhancement request for SuperDuper - could you add an option to turn Time Machine off before cloning to another volume, and then turning it back on again? I've just once again had the disaster of booting into my clone drive to perform some maintenance on my startup volume, only to find that Time Machine has been updating itself from the external drive's bootup volume because it thinks it's still the current one. I know this is TM's crappiness, and not your app's fault for not noticing that the volume it's backing up from has a new name compared to last time (I've already had a worse case of this involving Techtool Pro's eDrive, but that's been fixed either by MicroMat or by Apple since then), but is there some way you could build in 'turn off TM before backup' so that when I boot into the clone, TM is already off over there?

Failing that, or meanwhile, is there a pre-flight command I can get SD to run that will do the same thing?

Yours hopefully,

- Padmavyuha

[dnanian]

I've not seen that happen. Unfortunately, there's no documented interface for turning off Time Machine. But, if you add the backup drive to Time Machine's list of drives to ignore, it should certainly ignore it even if it's the startup drive.

[Dave]

I do this in my pre script:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine AutoBackup -boolean NO

And this in my post script:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine AutoBackup -boolean YES

It turns off Time Machine backups during the SuperDuper job and would presumably make them disabled on the backup drive if you were to boot from it.

[dnanian]

But that's a preference that's not documented; we don't use that kind of thing, because behavior can change at Apple's whim...

[Dave]

Oh, I completely agree it wouldn't be appropriate to build that into SD. I was just giving a workaround that does seem to work for now.

[rlfsoso]

Hi,

even though Dave mentioned the "undocumented caveat", I'd like to implement that workaround. Unfortunately I have two problems:

1) I have to use the prebinding post-script

2a) I have no idea how to run/create that script you mentioned. Of course I can paste it into Terminal and run it, but how to create a script to be used with SD properly?

2b) How do I modify the prebinding-script if that is the way to go to again switch TimeMachine back on after cloning?

Thanks,

Rolf

PS: step-by-step instructions for non-geeky simpletons like me needed…

[dnanian]

You really don't need to do this, Rolf. They're not going to run significantly slower at the same time as they are back to back...

[rlfsoso]

ok,

gotta believe you…

Rolf