Bootable Back-up via Airport Extreme

[arcobb]

Hi gang,

Sorry if this has been covered, I've been looking for a while and can't find the solution if there is one.

Is it possible to make a scheduled back-up using something like carbon copy cloner or superduper that is bootable to a hard drive connected to an airport extreme's usb port. It appears neither Carbon Copy or Superduper support it. It doesn't need to be bootable over the network, just that you can make the back-ups and then plug-in via firewire if needed and boot.

On a side note ... it doesn't look like time machine is bootable?

Thanks!

 

[mkrishnan]

With respect to the AEBS, from what I understand, the big problem is that the Airdisk is essentially a NAS, and so you do not have direct control over the hard drive -- and so you can't do things like make it bootable. I'm not 100% sure, though.

With respect to Time Machine, no, it really doesn't sound like it'll be bootable, particularly since it won't be a straightforward clone of your disk. It sounds like the model is that you would restore your disk to a specific point in the timeline after a catastrophic failure (discussed here, albeit with respect to Leopard Server).

 

[arcobb]

I wasn't meaning to make it bootable over the network, just when the back up is made ... if you unplugged the drive from airport and then plugged it into the computer itself it would then be bootable.

Seems like airport is ideal to do this if only it actually worked that way.

 

[mkrishnan]

No, see, that's what I mean. Can you even format an Airdisk from the client computer? My impression is that you must plug it in directly to the computer and format it first, and then put it on the AEBS. The AEBS provides you a file share, which is high-level access to the files and folders on the drive, not to the filesystem itself. But you must manipulate the filesystem in order to make the drive bootable, right? I don't mean to actually boot from it. I mean to make it so that it would be bootable when it gets attached directly. This is a lower level filesystem action and not just a matter of putting a dotfile in the root or something like that, as far as I know.

With every NAS I know about, you never have direct passthrough access to the filesystem. The best you can do is that you can tell the NAS hardware to make an action on the drive on your behalf. It wouldn't be impossible for Apple to make Airdisk able to do this, but they would basically have to do a lot of engineering above what they've done so far to make it happen.

As far as I understand, SuperDuper also cannot make a bootable backup over the network to a Mac serving a drive, right? Same logic.

It would be good to have that feature. I agree with you. But it would either require a hack that specifically addresses this one issue that essentially has only one usage, or it would be a substantial re-thinking of network file sharing.

 

[avalys]

Couldn't you just do the initial SuperDuper backup locally, and then run the subsequent backups over the network? I imagine the drive only has to be made bootable once...

 

[arcobb]

No, see, that's what I mean. Can you even format an Airdisk from the client computer? My impression is that you must plug it in directly to the computer and format it first, and then put it on the AEBS. The AEBS provides you a file share, which is high-level access to the files and folders on the drive, not to the filesystem itself. But you must manipulate the filesystem in order to make the drive bootable, right? I don't mean to actually boot from it. I mean to make it so that it would be bootable when it gets attached directly. This is a lower level filesystem action and not just a matter of putting a dotfile in the root or something like that, as far as I know.

With every NAS I know about, you never have direct passthrough access to the filesystem. The best you can do is that you can tell the NAS hardware to make an action on the drive on your behalf. It wouldn't be impossible for Apple to make Airdisk able to do this, but they would basically have to do a lot of engineering above what they've done so far to make it happen.

As far as I understand, SuperDuper also cannot make a bootable backup over the network to a Mac serving a drive, right? Same logic.

It would be good to have that feature. I agree with you. But it would either require a hack that specifically addresses this one issue that essentially has only one usage, or it would be a substantial re-thinking of network file sharing.

Thanks Mkrishnan ... a lot of this is over my head. I wasn't aware you needed special pass though access to make it work. Seems like the clever guys over at Carbon Copy Cloner should be able to make a work around to make this possible (I only say that because I think Mike Bombich was an apple engineer who worked with os x and seems to know much about it ... so maybe he might know a work around. I did find a post on their form that said that bootable back-up over airport was not supported with this release, so I guess we can hope!)

Yeah, this feature would be ideal for any notebook owners.