Trouble Backing Up Tiger Boot Volumne to LinkStation Pro NAS ***

[knowmacpro]

I tried backing up just using the mounted NAS volume that I connected with through OSX's Connect to Server method. (To my surprise, the NAS volume actually showed up in Retrospect Desktop 6.1 selectable volumes for duplicating). However, upon back up completion, there were over 2,000 errors, showing that a lot of Tiger's files couldn't be copied over.

Can anybody tell me if it is possible to clone over a OSX Tiger boot volume to a Buffalo LinkStation Pro NAS? Do I need a more advanced version of Retrospect? Buffalo told me that the LinkStation operates on a Linux kernel, and that the NAS drive cannot be formatted to be an Apple volume format.

- any wisdom will be much appreciated.

Ted.

[RonaldL]

What kind of errors were you getting? The LinkStation may be unable to preserve some of the Mac-specific attributes of the files (such as resource forks, etc..) You may have better luck backing up to a backup set rather than duplicating.

[CallMeDave]

Quote:

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Buffalo told me that the LinkStation operates on a Linux kernel, and that the NAS drive cannot be formatted to be an Apple volume format.

 

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It doesn't matter what OS the server uses, but the filesystem does matter. Retrospect uses the same API to Duplicate files that the Finder does when it copies; so if you can't successfuly copy a file by dragging it in the Finder, Retrospect is going to fail too.

 

In addition to using a File Backup Set instead of a Duplicate operation, another way to get around file system limitations is to create a sparse disk image on the remote volume, then attach (mount) the disk image and Duplicate to it.

 

You can do a man for "hdiutil" to learn more about disk images. There was also a discussion on MacInTouch a week or two ago about this. You'll have to manually mount the volume, but since Retrospect can't mount your NAS anyway (it only supports auto-mounting of AFP volumes) it doesn't make much difference.