SuperDuper Using A NAS

[MacDann]

My frustration with Time Machine has reached a point where I'm going to dump it for SuperDuper. However, I backup to a FreeNAS volume on another computer. Time Machine never had issues with this, but if I understand SuperDuper's documentation, I have to back up to a NAS using a disk image rather than a sparse image.

I'm curious to know how this worked out for others and if it's something I should even care about. I'm well versed in Macs and Linux, so I understand the difference between the two. I'm more concerned about the ease of restoring should I need to and the experience of others who have used this method of backing up with SuperDuper.

Thanks in advance,

MacDann

 

[HDFan]

I have to back up to a NAS using a disk image rather than a sparse image.

Same thing with Carbon Copy Cloner. Seems to work not using the sparse image, but I haven't tried a test restore as it looks as if the TM app won't open the NAS TM backup. Have to boot into recovery mode or use Migration Assistant?

 

[MacDann]

I ran SuperDuper on a couple of drives I have in my MP5 5,1 that I use for storage. Had it create sparse image files on my NAS. One drive is 630GB, took around 8 hours across a 1G network. The other drive was around 500GB and took slightly less time.

I would expect future backups to be far less time consuming, as they would only be incrementals to the sparse images.

Snagged a 6TB HD from OWC on Tuesday that I'll be dropping into the last drive bay on the MP. It comes today, so I'll try doing backups to it to see how that works from a time and speed standpoint. I may end up using the 6TB drive as my primary backup drive and copying or creating images of the backups on the NAS during idle time, like overnight.

More as I know it.

 

[MacDann]

So I dropped the 6TB drive into the MP and ran a Time Machine backup against it. Understandably faster than the NAS, took about 6-7 hours to do about 1.8TB of backup, I believe.

Went to do a SuperDuper backup on the same volume and realized I couldn't without deleting the Time Machine sparse bundle, so this evening I'm going to blow everything away and partition the 6TB drive into separate partitions for Time Machine and SuperDuper.

I see that SuperDuper will do a "Smart Backup" and not disturb the Time Machine file, but in doing so it just splatters stuff all over the remaining drive space, which is not what I want and somewhat disorganized for my liking. By creating separate partitions on the drive I'll be able to do Time Machine and SuperDuper without any conflicts.

I'll report back after getting this all sorted.