"Ignore ownership on this volume" - when must I have this unchecked?

[QonoS]

I've been setting up a second external backup/emergency boot HD, partitioning and re-partitioning, and fighting with the apparent OS X default of having "Ignore ownership on this volume" flagged for external drives. Not a brilliant design decision IMHO, but there it is.

 

For backup and Retrospect copy purposes, when is it necessary to be sure that that toggle is unchecked? Only when making a bootable clone of a volume, or at other times as well?

 

I've now unchecked "Ignore ownership" on all 3 volumes, but when I ran a couple of copy scripts (after doing a couple of re-partitions) "Ignore ownership" was checked on all 3. The first warning I got was in reviewing the log, after the copy was done (another less than brilliant design decision IMHO).

 

I've already done the bootable clone (with 20 execution errors this time as opposed to none the first time, go figure). But I also copied all the data on my first external HD to my second, using the Copy Assistant, to a second data partition on the new external drive. That volume does not need to be bootable. It contains a number of file media sets, some Retrospect 6 file backup sets, and some user data files. There's about half a terabyte on that drive, including a file media set for my primary boot volume (which, if it were to be restored, would need to be bootable). Do I need to re-do that copy as well?

 

System:

iMac i7 mid-2010 (Retro server), Retrospect 8.2.0 (399), Mac OS X 10.6.8

 

Many thanks, everyone.

[Lennart_T]

Copying/duplicating isn't one of Retrospect's best features.

 

I use a dedicated program for this. There are two good ones: SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner.

[QonoS]

I used CCC way back in the day (Jaguar?) and it did come with my new drive (paid license, I believe). So I could certainly try that.

 

I imagine the same issue regarding "Ignore ownership" would apply, however, and I'm still in the dark about that. I also have no idea if CCC can copy a directory to a volume (once the directory is defined as a Favorite, or as a Subvolume under Retro 6 and before), or a directory to a directory, and then verify the copy -- both of which Retrospect does.

[Lennart_T]

If you want a copy to be bootable, then "ignore owership" must be turned off.

 

You can try CCC or SuperDuper for free. I think both of them duplicate entire volumes only.

[QonoS]

1) If I don't care about a copy being bootable, do I care about "ignore ownership"?

2) If I am making a backup rather than a copy, does it matter if the destination volume has "ignore ownership" turned on?

 

I have a paid-license copy of CCC, as noted in my previous post, courtesy of my HD vendor. But if it only clones entire volumes, it's of limited usefulness to me.

[Lennart_T]

1) If I don't care about a copy being bootable, do I care about "ignore ownership"?

2) If I am making a backup rather than a copy, does it matter if the destination volume has "ignore ownership" turned on?

 

I have a paid-license copy of CCC, as noted in my previous post, courtesy of my HD vendor. But if it only clones entire volumes, it's of limited usefulness to me.

1) No, you don't care about "ignore ownership".

2) If you are doing a backup then the destination is always a media set. A disk media set has disks as members and that's where the .rdb files are stored. It doesn't matter about the ownership for disks with .rdb files.

 

CCC (the latest version) clones what you tell it to:

http://help.bombich.com/kb/explore/excluding-files-and-folders-from-a-backup-task