[willismorse]

I just purchased SuperDuper and am already having a warmer and fuzzier feeling than I did with Apple's Backup.

The one thing that I miss from Backup, however, is the concept of Quickpicks. Essentially, they are each just a list of directories/files to back up. It's really nice to be able to build up multiple scheduled backup scripts that are collections of quickpicks.

What's especially interesting are the ones that specify the various user data sets. Since they're created by Apple, they seem to contain more complete descriptions of data locations than you might come up with on your own.

Take the Address book quickbook, for example. Here's the heart of it:

"Graft Paths" = (
            {
                doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; 
                pattern = "~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist"; 
            }, 
            {
                doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; 
                pattern = "~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook"; 
            }, 
            {
                doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; 
                pattern = "~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.abd.plist"; 
            }, 
            {doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; pattern = "~/Library/Addresses"; }, 
            {
                doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; 
                pattern = "~/Library/Preferences/AddressBookMe.plist"; 
            }
        );

It seems to be enumerating 5 different places your Address book data might be spread over. Maybe that's just a union of all the places different versions of OS X have put this data, but I'm not sure how I'd find this sort of thing on my own.

Also, there are a fair number of quickpicks for 3rd party software products now.

The format looks pretty straightforward, although I haven't found a schema for it yet.

Some people who are doing things with it:

http://www.johnhugg.com/quickpicks/
http://www.wishingline.com/notebook/...es/2005_09.php