Various issues

[simonhildrew]

Hi everyone,

I've now been using SuperDuper for about 3 days and consider myself an expert (joke).

I bought two licenses - one for my powerbook g4 and another for my intel mac mini which will shortly be turning into a little server. It's on this second box that I've seen a number of issues and I haven't found any reference to them on the forums as yet (apologies if I haven't searched hard enough).

1) Right now it's copying doing a smart update - right before this though I clicked on the closed padlock and entered the password. On my laptop this changes into a open padlock and the text changes. I think I did see it do it on my MM too - but no longer. It stays a closed padlock but can no longer be clicked. OK - this may not be an issue - having quit and restarted just now the padlock is open. Weird.

2) Secondly, I had a really weird thing earlier where I started a Smart update of a drive from the Machintosh HD onto an external formac mini disk drive (partition called backup_daily). The settings were to not check permissions on the source drive before copy and it got stuck on the Preparing Machintosh HD step for several minutes. Now I'd not seen this step take longer than a second or two before so eventually I cancelled it ignoring the warning about the target disk. On a reboot though the computer would no longer correctly boot from the internal drive.
I'm continuing in my research as to exactly what happened and I had made a modification to the OS to disable the bfobserver process so I can't yet rule it out.

Can anyone comment on their own perception of the stability of backing up using SuperDuper? I've used it for a few days and would like to claim that I've noticed it behave oddly and not hugely reliably. When it works - it works really well though and this is by no means my end opinion of the software, I'm simply trying to convince myself that it is indeed as bullet proof as I would like it to be.

Thanks in advance for any input.

Simon

[dnanian]

Well, I've certainly found it to be extremely reliable.

As far as the two comments go -- I can't explain (1), which doesn't seem to reproduce for you. (2) could very easily be a failed or unresponsive external device, which would make sense given what you've said regarding "won't boot": it's likely that whatever was attached wasn't responding.

[simonhildrew]

Thanks for the swift response.

Well - I'll just keep an eye on it until my confidence increases - I'm just a paranoid sort of guy.

Do you have any idea how I can run it automatically? I've read that

"SuperDuper! does not have to be running for a schedule backup to
take place, but the user who scheduled it does have to be logged in,
with their account in front (if Fast User Switching is active), and the
screen must be unlocked."

I'm planning to log my mac mini away in a data centre which would theoretically allow anyone to walk up to it and start using it if it's in the state described in the help.

Any work arounds for running on the command line or similar?

Thanks again,
Simon

[dnanian]

You could install as root and schedule that way. Root can run when you're logged out. But I recommend against that -- I'd just lock the screen with a password protected screen saver.

[simonhildrew]

Does a password protected screen saver not constitute having a locked screen? If not what is the difference between the two?

Thanks,
Simon

[dnanian]

It doesn't. I phrased that poorly in the User's Guide: as long as we can get access to the Window Server (which from what we can tell works fine with a password protected screen saver), it'll work. Test before deploying, of course!