Technical Comments

When synchronising machines over a network, you may notice that SwitchBack treats two identical files as having different modification dates.  This can occur when the clock setting of the two machines differs by more than 10 minutes.  Usually the clock of either the server or the local machine has drifted.  Simply set the clock using the “Alarm Clock” control panel.  Sometimes, a machine has been set up so that the time is correct, but the machine location is wrong.  Check the “Map” control panel if this is a problem, and set the machines to the correct time zone.  If you do not fix this discrepancy, unpredictable results can occur.  It is possible to lose data should an older version of a file be viewed incorrectly by the system as more recent.  SwitchBack performs an internal check every time it accesses a remote volume, and brings up a warning dialog if this problem is encountered.

Pathnames are currently limited to 255 characters.  If you need to specify a longer pathname, you can use the alias resolving feature to access folders that are many levels deep.

System files, such as “VM Storage” and “Desktop DB” are ignored by SwitchBack.

Under System 6 or if temporary memory is not enabled, you should increase SwitchBack’s partition size in order to cope with large files.  A smaller partition size will result in slower performance.

When backing up large disks with folders nested many levels deep, you may find “out of memory” or “heap collision” errors.  When this occurs, SwitchBack has run out of room trying to keep track of all the folders.  Simply increase the partition size if this is a problem.