[mrfearless47]

Just a quick observation. I've now done multiple clones using SD 2.5. In general it works excellently and as expected. However, the first time I used it, it took more than 4 hours to clone about 70 GB onto a 500 GB harddrive. Since this was more than twice as long as any previous SD backup under Tiger, and almost 3 times as long as Data Backup under Leopard, I began to investigate the possible causes. Two possible causes emerged quickly. The most likely culprit was the active anti virus scanning under Intego X5 antivirus engine. Once I shut off active scanning, the subsequent backup process speeded up significantly and a complete clone of the same drive took just under 2 hours. Reactivating the AV software and turning off Time Machine (which backs up to a different drive) cut the cloning time to just over 2 hours. Turning off both AV scanning and Time Machine cut the clone time to about 1 hour 40 minutes.

Clearly having software actively running and actively scanning files as both Intego and Time Machine do affects cloning time significantly. I will probably need to write a script to shut both down during a clone and reactivate them after the clone is complete.

Aside from these differences, SD 2.5 is superb. I've been able to do a complete restore from my clones and everything appears to be in excellent shape, including my Parallels and Fusion VMs.

Congratulations Dave on a fine product.