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Old 01-19-2010, 02:32 PM
nephdoc nephdoc is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Bitterroot Valley, MT
Posts: 13
Question Files open when weekly boot drive SD clone created

I do a weekly clone of my boot drive to a standard volume on a separate physical drive, using SuperDuper. Although I have it set to run in the wee hours of the morning, I'm a night owl, and sometimes I find myself sittling at my computer dealing with stuff that's been cluttering my inbox when SuperDuper does its magic.

My biggest concern about this is my e-mail client (Entourage 2008). As I'm sure anyone reading this knows, Entourage stores everything in one giganormous file (mine hovers a bit larger than 2 gigabytes). I exclude the MS Office Mac "main user identity" folder from my Time Machine backups for this reason, but if the program is open when I'm doing my SuperDuper automated backup, I suspect I might corrupt the backup, or at the very least end up with an "moment in time" copy of the Entourage "Database" file.

Can anyone enlighten me?

I'm also curious whether the concept used in sparse images or sparse bundle images can be applied at the file level; i.e., would it be possible for MS to code Entourage (or its upcoming rebranding as "Outlook for Mac") so that what the user sees is one file, but what the OS and backup programs like SuperDuper see is 8 MB stripes that can be copied or not depending on whether the individual stripes have changed since last copy.

Thanks so much,
Jim Robertson
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