back up Network drives

[kevinerskine]

I recently reconfigured my system due to a crashed mini.
BEFORE all of my external drives (one for music, one for Video, one for Docs, and one for back-ups) had been connected to a mini. This acted as a server for a Macbook and an Apple TV.

The Mini Crashed and I decided I'd run all the drives into my airport extreme...making them accessible, but not having to have to replace the mini or tether the Macbook.

it worked great until I tried to Use SuperDuper to back up the "network drives" to another "network Drive".

Simply can't be done apparently.

Can anyone explain "why"?

In this age of networks, and having less need for dedicated servers, it would make sense to be able to back up drives...where ever they are.

[dnanian]

Because we cannot authorize against a network drive sufficiently to ensure proper metadata preservation, etc. In addition, a network volume is a 'virtualized' file system, where it might 'act' like HFS+, but it's actually NTFS, EXT3, FAT32, etc.

Supporting all those specialized and not-at-all-the-same disk formats (and all the potential problems in the network transport layers) wasn't something I wanted to do.

That's also why Time Machine uses an image when backing up to a network volume, by the way: the image acts like a local drive, and a real file system, which puts everything on the same level...

[kevinerskine]

Thanks Dave.
As an end user that's all greek to me...but I trust you know what you are talking about.
Does it matter that these are all Mac Journaled format and connected to an Airport Extreme?

[dnanian]

It doesn't really matter, no... you do know that the "Airport Utility" allows you to back up Time Capsules and the like to physically attached drives...?

[kevinerskine]

yeah I am anal. I use Time machine on my computer hard drive and then SuperDuper on the computer hard drives AND all those connected drives.

Thanks for the great product, by the way.

[dnanian]

Never hurts to have copies of precious data...