Finder Get Info gives puzzling response
 

I do my SuperDuper! clones on Friday nights.

It's Saturday morning, and I decided this would be a good day to bump my Mac Pro from Lion to Mountain Lion. Just to make sure my SuperDuper! clone was up do date, I did a Finder "Get Info" on the clone, and the returned info was that the volume was last modified on Tuesday at 6 am (even though the volume had been erased and re-created in a two hour cloning operation just 3 hours earlier.

The rest of this puzzle is that I don't typically DO anything with the clone other than replace it once a week, so why was it "modified" at 6 am 4 days ago?

Spotlight Searches conducted from my normal boot drive return filenames of both the boot and boot clone volumes, but that's the only way I typically interact with it myself in between auto-execution of the cloning script once a week.

Anyone have any idea what's going on here?

On a Mac listserv I frequent, I posed this question and was told by another SuperDuper! user that he confirmed my observations.

Thanks so much,
Jim Robertson

We don't do anything with Finder's Get Info - it's managed entirely by Finder. You can't rely upon that value to give you any accurate value of when the volume was modified by SD...

How about looking at things from the opposite perspective: does making a clone without doing "Finder copies" exploit features in the Unix core of the Mac OS that are not endorsed by Apple's programming or design guidelines?

I know that measuring the size of every folder on a drive requires looking inside each of them and can take a long time. I suppose checking file modification dates and volume modification dates could create similar problems.

Absolutely not - there's nothing 'not recommended' in using standard APIs to do copies.

Thanks for responding so quickly
 

I didn't mean to imply that there was (at least not in any derisive fashion). There's LOTS of stuff I know nothing about on the Mac. For example, when I learned way back in 1984 or '85 that comments I put in the little box that accepted such info in each file's "Get Info" comment box weren't really a PART of the file, but part of another, quite fragile, "Desktop" file that could be "rebuilt" (actually, DESTROYED and rebuilt), that blew me away.