You're still using a relative path, which is a maintenance risk, since there's no guarantee what the Finder's working directory will be. Translating between HFS and POSIX paths is *not* simply a matter of changing the slashes to colons (or vice versa) -- use "POSIX path of" and "POSIX file" to translate between the two. Short version in your case: lose the ":Volumes:" at the beginning of both paths. Alternatively, use Finder's long-hand references:
set a to file "2009-Q4" of folder "2009 Daily BUs" of ... disk "Server"
...or even mix the two:
set a to file "Applications:Retrospect 6.0:StorageSets:2009 Daily BUs:2009-Q4" of disk "Server"
As for why it re-wrote your "POSIX file ..." references, you must be using Tiger or earlier -- it has to do with how AppleScript handles constant expressions (the technique is called "constant folding"), and Leopard doesn't try to do that particular case.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
On Dec 17, 2009, at 7:20 AM, Curt Schultz wrote: