New User Strategy

[bill s]

Dave Nanian

I've recently experienced 2 hard drive disasters which necessitated 2 complete catalog rebuild and restore sessions with Retrospect backup sets. Each took over 5 hours of nervous time. There has got to be a better way. As a result I've discovered and decided to use your SuperDuper software and procedures.

I've ordered an external firewire hard drive which I intend to partition to use as as (1) a bootable Backup and (2) as a bootable Safety Clone.
If I understand your strategy correctly, after I set up the partitioned external drive I should regularly boot from the Safety Clone including when planning to install new system updates, applications, etc. When ready to install these new system updates & applications on my main Mac HD I would boot from that volume, do the installations and then "smart update" the Safety Clone. Additionally, Smart Updating the Backup partition from the main HD should also be done regularly, probably daily.
Have I interpreted your very well done instruction manual correctly?
Thanks for your help and your program.

Bill

[dnanian]

You've got it exactly right, Bill! (Thanks for reading the instructions, and I'm glad they were clear enough for you to get both the basic parts and the more advanced 'Safety Clone' concept.

I think you'll be really happy with the way this works -- let us know!

[bill s]

Dave
Thanks for your quick response. I received the external drive and installed everything. It's all working just as described. Thanks.

Although everything is working flawlessly at the moment, I'm still concerned about the 2 failures I recently experienced. I suspect that there might be a flaw in one of the system files which could jump up and bite at any time. Hopefully not. If it does happen again, I'll probably have to do an "archive and install". If I do, I assume I should do this on my main drive, shake it down for a few days and then reclone. Do you agree?

Thanks.

Bill

[dnanian]

I'm not sure how a flaw in a system file can cause a hard drive disaster. Could you explain a bit more about what you're thinking? With more detail, maybe I can help come up with a diagnosis.

In any case, yes, you'd want to archive and install to the main drive, not the safety clone. (The Safety Clone would actually maintain a checkpoint of the 'old' system in that case, and if you're careful -- don't do this without talking to me first -- you can clone it back if you have trouble.)

[bill s]

Dave

What happened both times was the system would not shut down properly, in essence it froze. I shut down using the power button (ImacG5). It then wouldn't boot up. Using Disk Utility from a System Disk, it was diagnosed both times as "invalid B Tree Node Size" and not repairable. TechTool couldn't fix it either. The second time I had obtained a compatible Disk Warrior boot disk. It went through 5 hours of repair to a new directory. Using the new directory, it wouldn't boot up. In both cases I eventually rebuilt a Retrospect catalog which predated the problems and restored from it. Although everything is working properly, I'm just a little wary that whatever caused the problem(s) might still be there.

Bill

[dnanian]

Hm. And no indication of *why* it froze? Sounds like you might have a bad system, rather than a bad file. Have you run the hardware tests on it?