SuperDuper doesn't "see" mounted volume over Airport

[crabwalk]

I've been using SuperDuper happily for a while to back up my Power Mac G5's two internal drives to Firewire drives. It's served me very well.

But today I wanted to use it to copy my Mail.app mail and settings over to my laptop. (I'd always copied them over manually, but I'd rather be able to smart update them back and forth when I go out of town and use my laptop for extended periods.)

The problem was that SuperDuper didn't "see" my laptop. That is, it never showed up in the pulldown menus that indicate the copy source and target. This despite the fact the laptop's drive was mounted (via Airport) and sitting right on the desktop of my G5.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? SuperDuper automatically sees my external Firewire drives as soon as they're connected and mounted, but for some reason it couldn't see my laptop over Airport, despite multiple attempts. Ideas?

Josh

[dnanian]

Sorry, Josh. As discussed in the User's Guide, we don't support copying to or from mounted network volumes (except as the destination of an image).

[crabwalk]

Well, that's a darned shame. Any plans to change that? (Apologies if you've been asked that 10,000 times.) And how does this guy do it?

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2...e_strateg.html

[dnanian]

He doesn't use a network: instead, he's using FireWire target disk mode (or he's connecting his backup to the other machine).

No short term plans to change it, though, sorry...

[ChicagoCarless]

That's a shame. I've used SD for a year now with my desktop and it's worked beautifully. But I'm getting a MacBook and going as wireless as possible, which for me means keeping my old desktop as a wireless backup server. I guess I'll be dumping SD and looking for another backup option.

Honestly, you do realize that in the past year more people have purchased laptops than desktops, not to mention decided to go with wireless home networks? Wires and cables are more of a hindrance than a help with a laptop. Why should I use your product, good as it is, if you force me to plug a wired hard drive into my wireless laptop just to get your product to work?

I have news for you. I'm a big boy. I'm smart enough to know that the network I'm backing up to is the one I created myself, thank you very much. I'll go find a backup solution that molds itself to my needs as the consumer rather than trying to force me to do things its way.

Perhaps you should repurpose SD for the Windows market? I hear those users actually like to be told what to do.

[dnanian]

I think you've misunderstood what I said, ChicagoCarless, so let me try again.

We're pretty carefully tailoring ourselves to the needs of the consumer, and are hardly ignorant of their needs. We're not forcing you to plug a wired hard drive into your wireless laptop.

On the contrary: you can back up to a network share. You just need to do so by backing up to a sparse image, which ensures that your ownership and permissions are exactly as they are on the source.

This works quite well, doesn't require you to install any kind of agent on your destination, and even works with NAS devices (like the various Buffalo and Infrant units) while still maintaining a fully Mac-compatible, native drive format.

What we *don't* allow is backing up from a network share. But the other way around -- which is exactly what most people (including you, it sounds like) are doing -- works just fine, as long as you store to a sparse image, as explained in the User's Guide.

So, no cables, no hindrances, and no Windows, unless you want to back up to a Windows box. That's up to you, of course: we certainly wouldn't tell you to.