Thank you very much for all the effort you put into your research! I think it is still very valuable. I wish I had stumbled upon it earlier, though.

Bernhard

Mention should be made of a crucial failing of Retrospect: As a default, backing up with Retrospect does NOT save any sparseimage files! The intention was to prevent massive consumption of backup space every time a sparseimage file changed, which would happen every time one of the files it contains changed. But that means that if you have secured some data by putting it into a disk image saved as a sparseimage (perhaps with a password), Retrospect doesn’t save it at all! I only discovered this after a hard disk crash when I found that my “secured” files weren’t saved at all by Retrospect. There is an option to change this default setting (which in true Retrospect fashion is buried in the horrible interface), but the default is you’re unprotected and Retrospect doesn’t tell you.

Thanks

Liam

Since my current backup drive is getting too small for all the stuff I have on my system drive, I’ve ordered a new dual drive enclosure from OWC. I intend to use that as a RAID1 setup for my weekly SuperDuper! clones. My current backup drive will then be used for continuous Time Machine backups. Some might call it over the top, but over the time I’ve learned that you can’t be sure/secure enough, concerning backups.