SD, NAS, WLAN - experiences

[ahnau]

Hi, all. Thought I would share my experience with SD so far, maybe someone will find it useful. I have an iBook G4, my wife has a G3, and I was running both of these wireless through a Linksys router/WLAN hub which also connects my broadband. I bought a SmartDisk 250GB NAS device, and plugged this into the router, then tried various backup programs to see what I could do (I also attached a 250GB USB1 disk to the USB port on the NAS, so it's serving up two disks of 250GB each). I had problems with most of the programs due to the 2GB/4GB limit on file size on network file systems, AFP and so on. Also I think the (lack of) speed of the wireless link was causing problems. At least once I think I managed to corrupt the filesystem on the SmartDisk (ext2) completely and had to reformat. So then I discovered SD. As advertised, it overcomes the file size limits by mounting the sparseimage directly (the images from both of my two machines are about 13GB). I had to wire my G4 into the router to get a 100MB connection, as over the wireless it was too slow. What I did try was making the original sparseimage with the cable in, then try and do a smart update over the WLAN, but this doesn't seem to work either - SD hung up, and in one instance the whole machine hung; in every case the sparseimage got corrupted (I'm not blaming the program, probably trying to smartupdate 13GB over WLAN is not a really great idea). So probably I'll keep the wires plugged in (I'm getting a couple of LAN-over-mains adapters so I can cut out the WLAN to my wife's study). I haven't tried any restores yet but I can mount the images and browse them so I imagine I can get stuff back if I need it. I'm still a little nervous, having managed to corrupt a lot of backups in test scenarios, but I guess I'll just have to live with it for a month or two and see how stable it is now I've found a combination it seems to like.

If anyone has any other suggestions as to how best to set this up, I'd be interested. I'll hope to post again with more feedback.

T.