Network drive won't auto mount

[Shamyl Zakariya]

I've searched the forums, and it looks like SD will automount a network drive ( to access a sparseimage on said drive ). The trouble is, I can't get that function to work.

Basically, at my work I've got a large NTFS network drive which I backup to via a sparse image. If I manually mount the network drive, SD happily runs the backup into the sparse image and everything's great.

Trouble is, if the network drive isn't mounted, SD fails, saying it can't mount the sparse image. This happens both when run manually, and when run via a scheduled backup.

I should mention -- the network drive's password is in my keychain, so it mounts unattended from the finder. Also, the network drive, being hosted on a windows machine, is accessed via SMB, not AFP. Finally, the drive is NTFS and as far as I can tell from manually running SD, there's no problem regarding the FAT32 2GB limit.

Is there a way to get it to automount? The lack of automounting is preventing scheduled backups from running at night if the network drive isn't mounted when I leave to go home ( the drive exists almost entirely for backup, so I don't keep it mounted 24/7 ).

Perhaps an applescript to tell the finder to mount the drive?

Thank you.

[dnanian]

Our network drive automounting is done by retaining an alias to the image file. We resolve the alias, and the system automatically mounts the drive the image is on. This should certainly work with an NTFS volume, as long as a normal alias to the file will resolve and mount. Why it's not working for you, I don't know, unfortunately.

You can certainly mount it with a script. If this is primarily an issue of scheduled copies, open the Library/Application Support/SuperDuper!/Scheduled Copies folder, then Control-click your scheduled copy and choose "Show Package Contents".

Once you're in there, you can edit the Copy Job.applescript file. Right at the top, there's a "before" and "after" section that can be used to run preflight and postflight commands. Simply add what's neede to mount the drive in the preflight area (and unmount in the postflight, if desired). Then, save the script.

Go back into SuperDuper, open the Scheduled Copies window, and edit the scheduled copy by double-clicking. Uncheck and re-check the checkbox, and we'll recompile the script for you.

That should do it.

[Shamyl Zakariya]

Where is the alias that is retained? I'd like to see what happens when I double click it. Perhaps I can track down what's going wrong there.

Failing that, I'll try out the applescript approach.

[dnanian]

It's internal to our saved settings; you can't really get at it...

Are you trying to do this by using the "Disk Image..." choice, or by pointing to the image volume itself? If the former, try the latter (and vice versa).

[Shamyl Zakariya]

I chose the "Disk Image..." option and selected a target folder on the network drive. SD created the image there. What's the other option? To select an existing disk image on the network volume? Would it suffice to select the image SD's already created, there?

[dnanian]

Yes -- just open the image (so it mounts), then select the volume it opens to in the destination pop-up.

[Shamyl Zakariya]

I'm not exactly certain which step actually did it; I futzed around and recreated my backup and schedules, but now it works. Thank you,

[dnanian]

I'm not certain either, Shamyl, but I'm glad it's working!