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Old 08-31-2005, 08:43 AM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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Hey, Steve: welcome! No problem being long winded: let's see what you've got planned.

25GB seems like a lot for a Safety Clone, although you certainly have the space. You can create a "test" Safety Clone to see how big you really need the partition to be and -- if you have a lot of Apple's Pro applications, you might be able to share more of their templates and data to save some space. But, given the disk space you've got, it's probably not necessary!

To use the Safety Clone properly, you definitely want to use it as the startup volume. If you don't, the changes made to the OS by software updates and application installs will happen to the "real" volume, and not be isolated to the Sandbox.

In general, you don't update the main volume until you're sure you approve of the changes made to the sandbox. Updating the volume can be done by reinstalling the applications and updates to it (after booting back to it, of course) or -- if you're confident -- you can do something called "cloning back".

I allude to the latter in the documentation, but because it's got a high potential for error, I consciously didn't explain how to do it. It's not hard, though -- you just have to be careful. To do so:
  • First, make a backup of the original volume, in case you do make a mistake.
  • When booted from the Sandbox, run SuperDuper!
  • Choose the Sandbox as the source, and the original volume as the destination.
  • Choose "Backup - all files" as the script. Do not use Safety Clone, or any other script. Only use "Backup - all files".
  • Choose "Smart Update..." as the During Copy option. Do not use any other During Copy option!
  • Review your choices. When you're sure they're right, click "Start Copying". When it's done, the original volume will be updated to the state of the Sandbox.
  • Finally, reboot from the original volume. Verify that things are as expected, and then use SuperDuper! to update the Sandbox as normal. (This will convert any new applications to Shared applications, etc.)

One additional caveat: if you created your own "connections" between the original volume and the sandbox using Aliases, those will not be updated properly. You'd have to literally create a manual alias from something on the source volume to the same location on the destination to have this happen. As long as you didn't (most people don't), you should be set.

(All that said, what part of p25 was ambiguous?)

For the External, are you suggesting a partition to back up the Safety Clone itself? That's typically not necessary, as anything done to the Safety Clone can be easily re-done to the original... and there's no user data on it (as long as you don't store User data outside the standard "user" places, of course).

We generally recommend that -- before you boot from it -- a backup volume should be named the same as the source. This is because aliases resolve to a volume by volume name, then path: if the boot volume isn't named the same as the original, and the original volume is available, the alias will resolve to the original volume, not the copy.

Naming the volume the same allows those aliases to be resolved properly.

Hope that helps... and see? Your question wasn't nearly as long winded as my answer, and I didn't even quote!
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