Thanks for the suggestion, Jurgen.

Dave,
If you implement "improvements" to scheduling in future versions, I hope you retain the option for the current approach - to skip "skipped" jobs. I like it this way. One of the things that annoys me about Retrospect is this: when we come home after a weekend or vacation and turn our Macs back on, Retrospect immediately wants to run all the missed backups!

We wouldn't eliminate the current method, denke. We'd likely add a different one that doesn't specify a specific time/date, but a "period".

That would be cool, Dave.
I'd be tickled if it would allow me to alternate Smart Updates between two partitions on my external FW drive from one day to the next. I had set up an elaborate system of 4 schedules, trying to get SD! to backup on Sun-Tue-Thu-Sat of the 1st and 3rd weeks and Mon-Wed-Fri of the 2nd and 4th weeks to one partition and the inverse to the other partition. The "next" dates did not make sense to me, though, and left gaps. From one of your other posts, I see that the schedule is really based on days of the month, however, so I'll just backup M-W-F to one partition and Su-Tu-Th-Sa to the other. The idea is, if something goes terribly wrong during a backup (or a restore) and messes up both source and destination, I've got another backup.
None of the scheduled backups has ever run, however, though a couple of the "next" dates have come and gone. I'm supposing that I misunderstood the requirements. I'm always logged in, and my Energy Saver settings are for the computer to sleep Never, the display to sleep after one hour, and the hard disks to sleep when possible. Is this incorrect? Does "display unlocked" mean the display cannot be asleep? I take it from another post of yours that having the hard drives asleep should be okay. (Just in case, I've now scheduled Energy Saver to wake up the computer 1 minute before the backups are scheduled.)

Unfortunately, relying on "cron" -- a system service -- to do scheduling has some disadvantages, including the fact that you schedule by "day" and "weekday" (actually, day OR weekday), but there's no concept of "weeks", so things get a little weird.

Anyway, the schedules should definitely run. Try setting one up for a few minutes from "now", then quit SD. Does it start and run?

Sure did. Tomorrow I'll see how it does tonight on a "dozing" computer.

It seems to have worked fine. It claims to be planning to do it again tonight, to the other partition. It looks as if it's working as planned. And it's so much easier to understand what is going on and what's going to happen than in Retrospect! And it's not in a proprietary format: I can see what's backed up! Excellent! :)

One cavil, though: I can't find a really quick and easy way to confirm that a scheduled backup went off as expected. I don't know how to see the log unless I run SD!, then click the Schedule button, then click Cancel to get rid of the sheet for making a new schedule - at which point I can see the Scheduled Copies page. (Interestingly, if I show the log without going to the schedule page, I get an earlier log - apparently from the most recent manual backup.)

It'd be nice if I could just (optionally) see something on my screen saying that the copy happened or didn't. Actually, the main copy page of SD! after a manual backup is very nice: all that green is comforting. I'd be glad to see that when I first check my Mac each day. But after a scheduled backup, SD! seems to quit, even when I select Do nothing from the Options page. Could this be an option? Or any kind of message that just waits to be dismissed, saying that the copy happened or didn't?

Btw, am I correct to suppose that once I've made my full "Erase then copy all files" backup, I can just keep making Smart Updates until I replace the Mac or the backup drive? No need to "refresh" the copy?

You can, denke. Install Growl. Once installed, run SuperDuper! one time. Then, examine Growl's preference pane. There, you'll see four different notifications you can turn on, any one of which can be made "sticky": that is, it won't go away until clicked.

You can use any number of notification styles as well.

You don't really need to do an "Erase" to refresh the copy: Smart Update continues to ensure it's the same as the source. It won't hurt to do so, though, except by taking time.

Thank you for referencing Growl
 

I originally purchased SD to create bootable backups. Recently, I started using SD for backups to DNS-323 units and was looking for a way to easily know the results of the nightly jobs. While I do not remember a failed backup, I do like to not assume. Growl compliments SuperDuper! nicely. Thanks for mentioning this, Dave. If you know of other useful programs, would you consider mentioning then in your Shirt Pocket Watch blog.

John

I'd like a sticky notification to pop up if a scheduled backup hasn't run for whatever reason (computer was asleep or switched off). As I understand it this is different from the current option of "Scheduled Copy Failed", as in if the backup begins, but has an error or failure.

This would be perfect, as I could then decide whether or not to run the backup when I see the notification. I'm not sure how this would be possible, as in my scenario SuperDuper hasn't fired up when I switch my computer back on.

A basic example to illustrate: a scheduled weekly backup is set for Monday 9am, but I switch my computer on at 11am on Monday. At this time SuperDuper would not run until next Monday, but I might not realise the 9am backup didn't run.

Is there a way to implement something like this?

Well, there are ways to implement everything, of course, but this isn't something we currently have. Doing so would require us to have a totally separate 'scheduler' process that's running fairly often (as opposed to just when you want it to), checking to see whether things have run, and warning a lot.

It's not a small thing - and many like the fact that we don't have a process that's constantly taking CPU to do this kind of task...

Fair enough.

I'll just set myself an iCal alarm for the scheduled backup, which will appear at first launch after the backup was supposed to run. A bit annoying, but it'll do the job for now.