Scheduled Smart-Update without logging in works at first but fails on later

[mlerch]

Please allow me to explain real quick what I did. Now this probably has been talked about, and if so please move my post under such existing topic.

Here is what I did.
- Platform: OS X 10.3.9 Server
- Logged in as root user
- Installed and launched SuperDuper!
- Selected to Smart-Update drive B (250GB backup drive) from drive A (80 GB startup drive)
- Selected to run a script before doing the clone which basically creates an archived MySQL backup
- Created a schedule to run nightly at 10:30pm
- Logged out of the system

Here is what happens:

- The first scheduled backup works perfectly. Clone created (but have not tried to boot from it since this is a production server and it is co-located and I really don't want to reboot from the backup drive if I don't have to).

- The second and sub-sequent backups seem to work also like clockwork.

- Then it happens - one morning I will log in and check to see that SuperDuper couldn't do a Smart-Update due to the fact that there is not enough room on the destination drive (please note that the clone was exactly that - a clone - the night before)

The Startup disc has about 30 GB space left. The backup drive I am cloning to is 250GB large, so at the most I would assume that even if the startup disc is completely full, and let's say I renamed a lot of large folders on the startup drive, I would need at the very most 160GB of free space on the backup drive (since the startup drive has a capacity of 80GB and you are doing updates in one pass - as explained in previous posts).

- In any case, the backup drive now only shows that there are 4KB of space left
- When I try to perform an erase and install, it will fail - get another error message
- So I open Disk Utility and try to erase the backup drive - once again, I get an error message stating that the backup drive can't be umounted.
- Next step is for me to reboot the server.
- After reboot I open Disk Utility again, erase the backup drive - no problem.
- Then I have to open SuperDuper under Root again, delete the old schedule, set up a new Smart-Update schedule with the new backup drive, save the changes to the script, Quick SuperDuper and log out. Now we are starting again with a few successful cloning processes until everything repeats itself.

-> Backup Drive full -> can't erase and update -> can't unmount -> can't re-format -> have to reboot -> blah, blah, blah


I did read in the User Manual something that a corrupt file could cause this to happen, or if the drive that is being cloned has a lot of activity. Now I really can't turn off the server to do a backup. That wouldn't be an option.

Truthfully, I am already happy that I got it to clone my server's startup drive without anyone needing to be logged in. That was huge for me. But it bothers me that I have this problem, which really makes this whole backup plan unreliable. Yes, I do check the server every morning anyway, but really would like to have a more reliable solution.

Oh yes, tried this whole thing on a friends X Server, also 10.3.9 .... Guess what - same problem!

Any idea why that would be? Please advise. Thank you.