Backup source airport extreme hard drive?

[hot8888]

Hi,
I was wondering if it is possible to backup a hard drive attached to the Apple AEB? In Finder, the hard drive is recognized and can be mounted/dismounted, but it does not appear as an available source drive in the COPY drop-down list.
(I know I can use it as a destination drive, but since I keep data files on it and want to back it up, can it be selected as a source drive?)
Thanks,

[dnanian]

Sorry, no; we can't copy from the AEBS.

[Mac Medic]

Hi,
I was wondering if it is possible to backup a hard drive attached to the Apple AEB? In Finder, the hard drive is recognized and can be mounted/dismounted, but it does not appear as an available source drive in the COPY drop-down list.
(I know I can use it as a destination drive, but since I keep data files on it and want to back it up, can it be selected as a source drive?)
Thanks,

If you have a newer "n" model ARBS, you can backup to an external USB attached hard drive via AirDisk. Just create a "sparge image" with your Disk Utility and put it on your backup drive. To backup, just select the image from the drop down menu. :)

[dnanian]

Right -- that's "to"... he's asking about "from"... :)

[Felix]

>> I was wondering if it is possible to backup a hard drive attached to the Apple AEB?

Sorry, no; we can't copy from the AEBS.

Why not?

I do a wireless Smart Update every night to a USB drive attached to my AEBS-N.

My strategy is as follows:

A 1TB Hitachi drive with eight Sparse Image backups on one big partition. There's a backup for each day of the week and a monthly backup completed on the first of every month. Every night the applicable Sparse Image backup is Smart Updated. Additionally, o/a the 15th of each month I run a full backup to another drive stored off site in case the Hitachi drive fails or the house burns down.

The only real issue is that the Sparse Image files continue to grow in size so I have to compress them occasionally in Terminal (hdiutil compact "Name of file.sparseimage") or collectively they'd outgrow my 1TB drive.

Any chance a compression routine could be included in future versions of SD? I'm not a programmer but doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to (optionally) include the above UNIX command after the image is unmounted.

[dnanian]

Because we can't fully authorize against network volumes, so we can't fully copy the data.

We keep hoping that Apple will improve their sparse image handling... doing it each time would be extremely slow and disk intensive. (In the end, you really should have sufficient space to store the image(s) on the drive, though...)