Moving to a New Mac
 

I moved my SD! external drive to a new computer, and copied over all of my important documents, leaving my apps and system files (including Library and Prefs folders) behind. My plan is to reinstall my apps from scratch, as I was having way too many problems with the previous (FWIW, Leopard) machine, and wanted a "fresh" start with the new (Snow Leopard) machine.

If after I install SD! on the new machine, I then copied over (from the clone sitting on my SD! external drive)

~/Library/Application Support/SuperDuper!
~/Library/Preferences/com.blacey.superduper!.plist
~/Library/Caches/com.blacey.SuperDuper!

would SD! immediately be able to do a Smart Update from my new Mac to my external SD! drive, or will SD! initially need to do a lengthy "Backing up your Macintosh for the first time" backup (in which case, there'd be nothing to gain by copying over those items)?

A Smart Update always "live compares" the source and destination drives. It doesn't keep a database of history, so you can certainly Smart Update from the new Mac.

However, if a huge amount of data is changed (like, everything), it may be faster to do an erase-then-copy than a smart update.

It depends upon how "huge" is defined: My docs folder, which is about 45% of the content of my clone, hasn't changed more than a couple of GB. So, SD! wouldn't need to do much with that. It seems that the data change would therefore pretty much be that which is due to the change from Leopard to Snow Leopard.

Well, that's a lot of individual files, of course - hundreds of thousands. But it'll work fine, just might be slower than an erase.

It sounds like you're saying it might be slower, but definitely not any faster. That seems counterintuitive...

But if that's true, then is there no advantage to copying over the plist, etc., and launching SD! as I've always done (i.e., via a scheduled Smart Update)?

Hmmm...regardless of whether or not I begin with a Smart update, do I nevertheless need to create a new schedule for the new machine, since it has a different MAC Address?

No, I'm saying it might be faster, it might be slower. You'll have to try it. :)

You do need to delete and create a new schedule, not because of a different MAC address, but because the drive's low-level ID is different.

As I'm so used to (and never get bored of) saying: "Thank you, Dave!" :D