How do I protect my HD after backup?
 

After I backup to my external hard drive, is there a way I can protect its contents temporarily?

Here is my intent.

I just did a clean install of Leopard on my MacBook. My process was such that I backed up via SuperDuper to my external HD. I installed Leopard via the "Erase and Install" method. Then, I used my SuperDuper backup to manually copy over the files that I wanted to my clean install of Leopard.

However, during this process, I was quite nervous that I might accidentally override or update my backup.

So, back to my original question.....is there someway to protect my backup HD during this process. Obviously, once I'm done with my upgrade and feel confident that I've retrieved all the data that I need off of the backup, I'll want to start backing up Leopard so I'll need to stop protecting the HD and resume backups via SuperDuper to the HD via my normal backup schedule.

You bet. Eject it and put it on a shelf.

I was actually hoping to protect it during the process of copying my data back to the fresh install of Leopard. So, obviously, ejecting it isn't an option during that part of the process.

You could just unmount it. If it's not mounted, you don't "see" it, and you can't accidentally futz with it. It's what I do to keep things safe from me. =)