backup goal
 

probably an faq but didn't see any likely candidates. What I want to do is conceptually simple. I want to make a perfect copy of a Macintosh disk and store the image on a network attached storage device. Then, if the hard drive on the Macintosh should fail, it should be possible to build a bootable disk from this image residing on the network attached storage. Local FireWire drives etc. are not an acceptable solution part because our existing backup processes replicate the local backup image to a offsite storage. Is the backup model I want possible with superduper or is there another product or process I should be looking at?

thanks

Sure, esj: see "Backing up over a network" in the User's Guide.

I took a look and it looks like it should handle my needs for backing up the image but I'm not clear how one would restore it to another disk as a bootable image. I did read the section on recovering from disaster but again that seem to be mostly focused on local disk storage rather than net network.

Unfortunately, this is one of those edge condition scenarios. I need to make archival copies of three machines, store the information somewhere safe and if we should ever need the machines again, be able to restore them as working machines or at the very least access some of the files.

sometimes I find myself wishing these weren't g3/g4 machines so I could just snap them up as virtual machine images.

You'd either copy them locally and access them there using those steps, or use one of the three Macs to restore the other, putting the Mac-to-be-restored in "FireWire target disk mode".