Networking question

[houltmac]

Currently we have a small workshop setup which requires us to backup, mirror and otherwise move Mac OS, data and files around like mad. For this we obviously use SuperDuper! and that has worked fine until now.

Previously we have used LaCie E-HDDs of all kinds with SuperDuper!. We have had what we called "Booter PPC" and "Booter Intel" partitions with Tiger, DiskWarrior, SuperDuper!, and other vital apps, settings and the like installed to them. Other partitions were used for client backup. This was great and never let us down, but we had issues:

1. Cables would knock cups, screws and other parts over left and right.
2. The place looked a mess for clients coming into the workshop.
3. 10GB of every drive (mainly smaller 160GB models for size and price) were taken up by the "Booters".
4. Disks (OS X and so on) were constantly scratched and re-written costing a fortune every month.

The days of dragging around E-HDDs, power cables and FireWire cables was behind us we thought as we implemented new methods. We now use our small iMac not only as a FileMaker/browser/general workhorse machine but also as a server allowing us to NetBoot all these partitions to client machines as and when they come into the workshop. This is working great (barring the Software Update issues and roaming profile pains we are experiencing); it even works on our little subnet so as not to interfere with the offices.

What we can't get to work however is SuperDuper! to a networked volume. We have the two new TerraByte drives hooked up to the iMac server and can mount them to any machine as when it's NetBooted to the same server. Is there a way to get SuperDuper! to see these networked FireWire drives to backup to?

Booted: NetBoot
Backup source: Macintosh HD (internal drive)
Backup destination: Partition on a FireWire drive on the server mounted on the NetBooted desktop of the clients machine
Backup software: SuperDuper!

Any ideas? Thanks in advance and thanks to Dave for sorting out my confirmation woes.

Matt

[dnanian]

Did you try the method in the User's Guide under "Backing up over a network", Matt?

[houltmac]

Sorry for the late reply, my connection at home was down last night.

Indeed we did Dave, and it worked fine (except on one Intel Mac NetBooted from our server in which case SuperDuper! crashed as soon as launched and opened the Guide instead), it would simply be more convenient (for someone doing this 10-30 times a day) if we could simply use the quick drop down lists... Wondered if a workaround was available or perhaps another feature in the works (although I realize this isn't an easy thing to achieve).

[dnanian]

Quick drop down lists of... what?

[houltmac]

Quick drop-downs for Source and Destination which would also allow us to point at network attached volumes...

We tried more little tricks today and honestly I can't say what because even we are starting to get confused at the amount of backwards and forwards we are doing; it's starting to get a little silly. We did manage to get network volumes mounted eventually although they always had the wrong volume name which is odd. It worked for a while until the server restarted though.

[dnanian]

Ah. Well, the problem with this is that it requires a significant amount of complexity, with "agents" running on far-side Macs. At present, at least, this is kind of outside the scope of what we're trying to do with SD...