Backup to Pogoplug drive

[Hugh]

Has anyone experience backing up with SuperDuper! to a drive attached to a Pogoplug?

Just wondering if it works.

Hugh

[dnanian]

It's not something I've ever tried.

[Hugh]

Dave,

Thanks for the comment.

After hearing of Pogoplug as Leo's pick on MacBreak Weekly, as well as Andy Ihnatko's recent review, I've been interested in it. Although I'd primarily use it to hold my iTunes tracks, I thought about the possibility of using SuperDuper! with it.

I imagine I'll stick with external FireWire for my SuperDuper! backups.

Hugh

[dnanian]

Ah, I saw your post up on the Pogo community. I didn't respond there because it won't let me post without joining, but if you review "Backing up over a network" in the User's Guide it should just work as described there...

[Hugh]

Great. It looks like backing up to a sparse disk image on the Pogoplug drive should work fine. That actually works out best for me, because I'll be able to format the network drive as a single volume; with my current external, I've got a couple volume partitions, with one being the exact size as my iBook's internal drive.

Thanks for your help. If I end up getting a Pogoplug, I'll post my experience using SuperDuper! with it on this forum.

Hugh

[dnanian]

OK, Hugh! We'll await your report.

[Hugh]

I forgot to mention one appealing feature of the Pogoplug. Unlike other NAS devices, you can attach an HFS+ disk to it. You can use the same disk as a Pogoplug drive, then later attach it directly to your Mac over FireWire.

At least, that's how it should work, in theory.

As the SuperDuper! user manual noted, network backup to a read/write "sparse" image file is recommended with HFS+, NTFS, and ext3 volumes. The only (current) caveat with Pogoplug is that it doesn't support journaled HFS+ volumes. Hopefully, that will be resolved in the future.

[dnanian]

Being able to attach an HFS+ volume to the Pogoplug (which you can do with the Airport Extreme/Time Capsule, too) doesn't mean you can actually write directly to it with SD (in fact, over a network, you can't). The file system is abstracted by the networking layer (netatalk, most likely).

However, it does mean you can use the trick described in the "Airport Disks" post at the Shirt Pocket blog to speed up your first backup and subsequent smart updates.

[Paranoid]

Originally Posted by Hugh

I forgot to mention one appealing feature of the Pogoplug. Unlike other NAS devices, you can attach an HFS+ disk to it. You can use the same disk as a Pogoplug drive, then later attach it directly to your Mac over FireWire.

At least, that's how it should work, in theory.

As the SuperDuper! user manual noted, network backup to a read/write "sparse" image file is recommended with HFS+, NTFS, and ext3 volumes. The only (current) caveat with Pogoplug is that it doesn't support journaled HFS+ volumes. Hopefully, that will be resolved in the future.

Hugh thanks for this, have you had a chance to test it and see whether or not Building Insurance worked?? again i'm assuming that it would work fine but looking for confirmation as Dave said that it awsn't something that he had tried as well.

I await your response

[creativejam]

I had to use a Sparse Image rather than a Sparse Bundle. Hope that helps.