NAS drives aren't "the future", no. In general, while I think a NAS is great, it's not as good as a
primary backup.
You haven't been able to experience this on your PCs because, well, they can't do it, but one of the great things about SuperDuper! is that you can make a backup directly to a USB or FireWire drive (on Intel, at least - PPC macs can't boot from USB), and if you lose your internal drive, you can trivially start up from your backup and keep working.
I strongly advocate that kind of backup as your primary. They're faster to update, easy to put in a safe deposit box, inexpensive, small and convenient.
Restoring a full system from a NAS device is more problematic. But that doesn't mean it's not possible to do. You just have to bring up a system where you have networking.
You can do this by installing a basic install, from your OSX DVD, to a cheap memory stick. A 16GB stick will be more than sufficient. Just install OSX to it, copy SuperDuper! to it, and if you need to do a full restore, start up from the stick, connect to the NAS, open the image and use its volume to restore to the internal. That's both easy and inexpensive (and having a system on a memory stick is useful for other things, too, like system repair).
Alternatively, you can actually also mount an AFP-supporting NAS from the install DVD, but it requires using the command line ("Terminal"). This is kind of technical, but the steps are as follows:
- Boot the Leopard Install Disk
- Open Terminal from the Utilities menu
- Use ping to see if you can reach your NAS box (you'll likely need its IP address)
- Create a mount point for your NAS box, i.e "mkdir /Volumes/nas"
- Mount your backup drive manually. For AFP (from testing I've done, SMB does not work from the Leopard DVD, so as I said your NAS has to support AFP properly), you'd use:
Code:
mount_afp afp://username:password@NAS_IP_ADDRESS/NAS_volume_name /Volumes/nas
all on one line. If there are any spaces in the above, you need to quote the parameter.
- Exit terminal, "exit"
- You'll then use the steps in the User's Guide to mount the Sparse Image and restore with Disk Utility.