When the new Airport Extreme Base Station came out, I was happy to see that it had some support for attached USB drives. It's a reasonable (though not perfect) way to share data in a home/SOHO situation, and I figured people would be using it to back up with SuperDuper! So -- to help out...
General Comments
A few things to point out right off the bat:
As you've likely seen elsewhere, the Airport Disks are not fast. Don't expect blazing speeds: wired, I've seen a maximum of about 1.5MB/s.
The AEBS gets very, very cranky if you get to a disk full situation. I've seen it crash more than once. Don't do that.
Remember that HFS+ drives are made available through AFP, and FAT32 through SMB.
Don't format any drives you're going to use with SuperDuper! as FAT32: use HFS+ (and partition properly for the Mac processor type you're using -- GUID for Intel, Apple Partition Map for Power PC).
Make sure to connect a power supply to the drive.
As general advice, please don't cheap out when you get an external drive. Really. Get one with a real Oxford chipset, USB/FireWire if possible in case you want to attach it directly to your Mac.
Don't expect miracles. This is an inexpensive solution, and it behaves like one. If you want a real NAS, I suggest an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+: it's faster, redundant, recoverable. I'll have another post about the ReadyNAS soon.
Remember, this is a first generation ("Rev A") product. It's likely to go through teething pains. Don't rely on them as your only backup!
Using Airport Disks with SuperDuper!
You'll note that your Airport Disks don't show up in the SuperDuper! pop-ups. This is by design: we can't currently copy directly to or from a network volume due to authentication/permission/metadata issues.
Instead, you'll follow the steps in Backing up over a network in the SuperDuper! User's Guide (Help > User's Guide), and back up to a read/write sparse image stored on the Airport Disk.
We often get asked why SuperDuper! can't back up directly to a network volume. What most people don't realize is that, for security reasons, you can't directly authenticate as "root" over a network, and that means it's not possible to store files with system ownership on a network drive.
An image, on the other hand, acts as a "local drive", and can be authenticated against, even though it's stored remotely. This ensures that your files are backed up with full fidelity, including proper ownership and permissions. And since it's formatted as HFS+, it avoids various situations that can ensue trying to emulate HFS+ semantics and metadata storage on a non-HFS+ drive, while still storing in a native, non-proprietary, Mac-native format.
I'd suggest doing your first full backup directly to the USB drive, rather than over the network. This'll be a lot faster. You can then connect the drive to the base station, and re-select the image using the "Disk Image..." choice in SuperDuper!'s destination drive pop-up. (Note that although the image will be grey, you can still pick it, and ignore the "overwrite" warning. Yes, I know that UI sucks.)
That should do it: enjoy the base station!
29 Apr 2007 at 10:11 pm | #
My LaCie 1 Terabyte ethernet drive (network drive) came formatted as an XFS volume. The LaCie tech rep said its an SGI (Silicon Graphics) format, which works well with Macs, so I left it. Seems to accept data well from over the Airport Extreme (new model) home network. My only issue is the speed (lack of) when trying to use Super Duper to do a wireless network backup. Super Duper has recommended a direct cable hookup for the very first backup, which I will try, and then Smart backups from that point on over the network. Will report back on performance....
23 May 2007 at 09:37 am | #
Hello,
I had a problem when executing the directions above and found a solution, I hope this helps other users.
Lacie 320gb lego brick, partitioned into 4 drives, attached to a Apple Airport (802.11.n). I followed the instructions above, my first backup with the drive attached directly to the computer, sparse image, all went well. Moved the drive onto the Airport, mounted the drive and did a Smart Backup - all files. The backup began but claimed that that 0.00MB were already up to date so it started to backup the entire drive over the network (slow!). Then I realised that the original image made over the direct USB connection was not showing up on the drive. Went into AirPort Utility and changed the permissions on the disk from “Secure Shared Disks: With accounts” to “:With a disk password”. The Sparse image on the drive showed up and Smart Update is working off the correct image.