Backup to cheap network drive impossible?

[Schalke04]

Hi,
Here comes a quote from the user manual:
"Note
It’s very important that the network drive support files larger than
4GB. FAT32-based servers or NAS devices will not work, and fail
pretty spectacularly when this limit is reached.
Please ensure the network volume is HFS+, NTFS or ext3, all of which
support large files."

And this is a summary of what I have found out:
Most cheap network drives run on a mini Linux distro which can only handle FAT32. It is possible to create a HFS+, NTFS or ext3 partition on the hard drive, but the network drive will just see this partition as used space and it will therefore be impossible to create a sparse image on this partition. Therefore it is impossible to back-up to (most) cheap network disks.

The above is my conclusion after days of searching the web, reading manuals and trying things out with my network disk. I would love it if someone could prove me wrong, since that would mean that I could start using my network disk for back-ups. I did purchase the thing (mostly) for that.......:eek:

Looking forward to someone's reply.

Kind regards,
Schalke04

[dnanian]

In general, I'd suggest not using a cheap network drive. You're trying to get a reliable backup: it's worth investing in something that's above the "cheap" level... and if you can't, I'd suggest just connecting the drive directly.

[Schalke04]

That is a fair point and you are probably right. I would appreciate it if you would let me know if what I was saying is correct, i.e. could I somehow create a 200 GB sparse image on a FAT32 file system?

My Thanks in advance,
Schalke04

[dnanian]

No, you can't, because the file size limit is 4GB.

[Schalke04]

Thanks for your answer. I will just use mu USB external harddrive in that case.

kind regards,
Schalke04