Backing up to AirPort Disks (via AirPort Extreme Base Station)

[didactus]

Hi,

The new Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station with 802.11n claims to have a network disk sharing feature called AirPort Disk.

Could SuperDuper! be used to make bootable partitions on such a disk? If not, could Sparse Image backups be used like with other kinds of network fileshares?

Thanks!

[dnanian]

I've got mine on order and it hasn't arrived, so I can't confirm from direct testing, but I'm certain that it'll work with sparse images.

[grahamgilbert]

I've just got my Airport Extreme and I can't figure out how to do this sparse image thingie. I want to have all my external disks plugged into the AE. They show up fine in the finder and for general use it's fantastic, but the disks are nowhere to be seen in SD.

I have one disk to backup my laptop's internal drive and one disk to back up the remaining usb disk.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've not found any options at all that I can edit until I've selected two volumes.

I can see how I'd make a backup of my laptop using disk image (are they bootable?), but am I going to be stuffed in making a backup of a network disk onto another network disk?

Cheers for any light you may shed onto this problem

[dnanian]

See the User's Guide, Graham -- "Backing up over a network" gives all the details you need.

(I've done my initial tests, by the way, and things seem to work fine to the drive, although it's not super fast. The base station also crashes badly if the attached drive fills, so be careful!)

[grahamgilbert]

Yeah, I've got my laptop's internal drive backing up to a disk image (I am right in thinking that these are bootable?), but I was wondering how to back up one usb disk onto another when both are plugged into the airport extreme. If it's not possible, then maybe this would be a good feature to think about for a future release? The new AE is going to take NAS to the masses.

[dnanian]

It's not directly bootable, but you'll be able to boot from it once restored to a supported startup device.

NAS -> NAS copying is not currently possible, except as mounted image -> mounted image.