Burn to DVD?

[dnanian]

Is it correct that "Copy newer" will skip files with older created/modified times than when they've actually been added to the filesystem. Downloads are a good example of that kind of file so I'm careful to know how "newer" is being interpreted. But that's not relevant with SU, if I understand things correctly.

SuperDuper!'s "Newer" isn't "Newer since last backup". It's "Newer than the equivalent file on the destination". Every file is always evaluated: files aren't skipped because they're newer/older than some global timestamp. So, no, this isn't a problem.

Issue with exclude:

The main "Backup - all files" script excludes var/db/BootCache.playlist and var/db/volinfo.database, but those files exist on the destination volume. Not sure if the original backup or the SU copied 'em since I only noticed after the latter.

I'm fairly sure that excludes are excluded as they should be. If you didn't use erase-then-copy or smart update, those files would indeed still be there. Or, if you checked after you booted, they'd get recreated...

Thanks for responding to my VersionTracker feedback. Hope I didn't sound like I was giving misinformation about the way script editing worked.

Well, frankly, I wasn't quite sure what you were getting at, and VT is a terrible place to do support/ask questions. So... fill me in about what you were seeing/confused by!

About the capacity check... after posting I thought of mentioning that a simulation mode would be convenient for certain scenarios with backup media storage planning, as I'm currently doing, especially when the the space rules for dealing with disk image files aren't known. For example, I tested creating a disk image of the system volume (~19GB) on another volume with ~25GB free. If I'd let that run it would have overflowed, as expected. A simulation, safely running non-inactively for an hour or two then warning that the real deal would have failed, would have been nicer than having to manually interact and abort.

Yes, we've considered that as an extension of What's going to happen?, but other things have priority at present.

And/or is it possible for the temporary volume to use space on a different volume than the image file's final destination? Several visits to the hdiutil man page have failed to reveal a way of doing that.

Not that we've seen. Conversion is done in place. But conversion isn't strictly necessary... manual use of a sparseimage can resolve this issue, allow faster backups (by skipping the other steps), and allow future smart updates of the image to boot.