Backup To Mac Mini External Drive
 

I currently use SD to create a bootable copy of my MacBook via a USB drive. I'm also looking into buying a Mac Mini, along with a AirPort Extreme base station.

Question: can I connect my current SD backup drive to the mini, and use it as a network backup drive, that I can later connect to my macbook to boot from if needed? Or can I even boot from the net drive?

I realize the backup will be slower than before, but if it isn't more than 2x or so slower, it'd be nice to have that option.

-- Owen

BTW: SD saved my back side .. I used it to back up my system before upgrading to Snow Leopard. But the SL DVD was flaky, and I had to use the SD system to boot from and fix things. Whew, thanks!

Definitely not. Network backups are not directly bootable. And it'll be a lot more than 2x slower...

OK, good to know, thanks.

I think I can do wireless Time Machine backups to the net drive attached to the mini, right? Or is the wireless network the bottleneck and I need a direct ethernet connect to the mini? I should note that I do NOT use TM for the entire disk. I exclude Movies & Music as well as temporary things like Downloads and Trash and system files.

Here's my current approach: I bought a OWC drive that fits my laptop but with 2x the memory. Partitioned the disk. Use one partition for SD, the other for TM. But my preference for TM would be a net drive, for convenience. Schedule for reasonably often. Then using SD for full backup every week or so.

Make sense? Or is that also too slow?!

Alas, as an ex-Sun Micro engineer, I'm so used to completely networked systems (NFS, no local storage at all!) that I forget what the Real World is like!

You can certainly use TM against networked AFP volumes, like attached to the mini, and then connect directly and use SD to get the bootable backup. Make sure you partition properly as GUID (see the Frequently Asked Questions).

I'm guessing you weren't a ZFS engineer? :)

I worked briefly at Sun in 1993-1994, as a sysadmin (e.g. for the team developing the original SPARCstation) and helping with migration from Solaris 1 (SunOS) to Solaris 2. Seems like an forever ago even though it's been "only" 16 years.