scheduling an unattended backup on MacOSX server

[gmachen]

Dave Nanian obviously is preoccupied with this week's stellar release of SD! 2.5, yet to his credit still finds time to work the forums as best he can, bless his heart! Although he understandably doesn't have time for extended technical tomes on the complexities of Unix.

So I'm wondering whether there are any other Unix experts out there who can explain the - what to me - are very surprising putative differences between doing things in sudo as opposed to formally being logged-in as root, which arise from the security needs by network administrators to clone Mac OS X Server drives while logged-out.

I'm academically curious as to why:

- If the SD! scheduling (only!) is done under sudo while logged-in to an admin account, instead of while logged-in to the root account, it "won't set your Home and other items to that user's account for graphical apps." Does this mean it won't set permissions correctly? I really don't understand: What difference does it make what account the clone is done from if SD! is making, well, a clone, after all? I would think that all account assignment settings already had been made when things originally were installed. What am I missing?

I'm really surprised by this! When I launch other apps under sudo, they seem to think & act like they're in the root account:
- Such apps' plist preferences go into the root account's Library/Preferences folder.
- With Finder launched as root, moving something to the Trash goes to the root account's Trash folder.
- Etc., etc. I trust you get the idea.

I just need to understand the rationale behind some of this Unix stuff, even if I haven't been through the some seven years experience I'm told it takes to really get a handle on Unix. I'd like to think that our utilities' GUI shells on top of Unix put the power of Unix also in the hands of the slightly less technically sophisticated.

Thanks!