This works great; in the morning, I can just pick up my PowerBook and head to the office. Except for one thing: the external FireWire drive is still attached. Sure I could just disconnect it, but do you want to see that dire message that appears when you disconnect a drive without unmounting it first? Me neither. The obvious solution: Tell SuperDuper to eject the drive when it is finished.
The problem: How? Simple. Write a small shell script to eject the drive and have SuperDuper run it after the copy and before the computer goes to sleep. Standard disclaimer: I've been using this successfully on a 15" PowerBook 1.5 GHz running 10.4.6 and SuperDuper 2.1 (v77). Use at your own risk, etc etc.
Here's what you need to to:
- Write the script. This is really easy. My script looks something like this:
The #!/bin/sh line should be the first line.#!/bin/sh /usr/sbin/diskutil eject /Volumes/BootBackup exit 0 - Save the file somewhere, such as ~/bin/ejectBootBackup.sh (you can call it whatever you like, that's just the name I use since my backup drive is called, uncreatively, BootBackup).
- Copy/Paste this line into a Terminal.app window:
That just tells Mac OS X that the script is a program to be executed. Be sure to press Return after that line. You should not see anything in Terminal after you paste that line of text in. If you did, something must have gone wrong. If you change the name of the file to something else, make sure to change the chmod line, too!chmod 755 $HOME/bin/ejectBootBackup.sh - Attach your drive, launch SuperDuper, click the Options... button. On the General tab, choose 'Sleep Computer' for the action to to be taken 'On successful completion.' Do not click OK yet! Now click the Advanced tab (located next to the General tab). Check the box next to 'Run shell script after copy completes.' Then click Choose... and select the file that you created in the second step. It ought to look something like this when you are done.
- Now click OK to get back to the main window. The main SuperDuper window now ought to look something like this. Note that "InternalHD" and "BootBackup" are the names I use. Yours may be different.

