[ericob]

Originally Posted by dnanian

First, I used the wrong term -- sorry. I didn't mean "much" in quantity terms, I meant for permissions -- trying to copy a whole system, and authorizing against the whole thing.

Gotcha. Note that I'm not intending to (try to) copy a entire bootable system by dragging files in the Finder. (To copy a bootable volume I'd of course use SuperDuper! ) But neither do I expect to be able use the Finder to drag around files that are owned by other users (the System included). However, I can get around the permissions problems at the point of creating the image... I use SuperDuper!

But, regarding the rest -- sorry. We can't do that... and even if we could, they'd be seen by Finder anyway, since you'd have to mount (or we would)... and Spotlight sees the files as soon as they hit the file system, since that's all done with kqueues.

Block restore -- the only real way to avoid mounting -- couldn't be done to a folder either, because it happens at far too low a level. You'd have to replace the *entire* drive with the restoration... and then it gets seen, and indexed. Etc.

Well, I didn't know the limitations of reading from an image directly. It appears that there's no way to just reach in there and pull files out, one at a time, sequentially. And you write "You'd have to replace the *entire* drive with the restoration." That's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. Hence the concept of "restoring to a folder." Apparently, if the backup file was some form of archive file (instead of an image file) I could then copy out of the archive to another destination without exposing the files inside the archive directly to the file system. Hmm...

So, unfortunately, we don't look to be the solution to your needs. Sorry, Eric!

Not entirely... I can get the data backed up completely and accurately (to a disk image) using SD. To then copy the contents of that image to a folder, it looks like I will have to mount the image (ugh), then do the copy operation from the Terminal with "sudo cp" or some such so that I can completely and accurately restore all the files, including invisible ones and ones I don't own.

*sigh* Not exactly one-stop shopping.