Clone Time Machine from local FW drive to NAS drive
 

Hello,

I am a little new to Macs and am trying to learn as I go. I understand that you can clone an existing Time Machine drive to a new drive using SD. My question is, would that work also on a network drive connected through Ethernet (i.e., a NAS)? I have ordered such a NAS device and am trying to decide the best strategy to move all my back ups from three different machines to the new device.

If I clone my existing Time Machine drive to the new NAS drive, can I then set SD up so that it will create a full smart backup to the same drive to which
I have moved the Time Machine backup?

And if I do that, how would I restore that SD backup if I need to? I suppose that I would not be able to boot from the NAS drive....

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Gianfranco

While you could copy your Time Machine backup to an image stored on your NAS drive, you'd be doing that for backup only -- it couldn't be "used" by Time Machine. SD! doesn't write directly to NAS drives, and NAS drives aren't bootable, so you'd have to get network access to the image to be able to restore it.

I see. So to restore from a NAS drive to, say, Mac #1 I would have to connect to the NAS drive from another computer on the same network (Mac #2), then use Mac #2 to clone the SD! image drive from the NAS to the local drive of Mac#1. Is this correct?

Thanks!

PS I read in some forum posts elsewhere that there are in fact ways to use Time Machine on a network drive, provided that one can initialize the Time Machine drive connecting it directly to the Mac as a local drive. After that the drive can be set up as a network drive and Time Machine should be able to recognize it. I guess I will have to try to see if cloning the existing Time Machine backup from the local drive to the NAS will enable Time Machine to recognize the drive....

In general, I don't think it's terribly wise to use Time Machine in an unsupported way. There are likely reasons for the restrictions.

And, yes: that'll certainly work (for restoration).

You have a point...
 

Thanks for your advice.