Backup source airport extreme hard drive?

[Felix]

>> I was wondering if it is possible to backup a hard drive attached to the Apple AEB?

Originally Posted by dnanian

Sorry, no; we can't copy from the AEBS.

Why not?

I do a wireless Smart Update every night to a USB drive attached to my AEBS-N.

My strategy is as follows:

A 1TB Hitachi drive with eight Sparse Image backups on one big partition. There's a backup for each day of the week and a monthly backup completed on the first of every month. Every night the applicable Sparse Image backup is Smart Updated. Additionally, o/a the 15th of each month I run a full backup to another drive stored off site in case the Hitachi drive fails or the house burns down.

The only real issue is that the Sparse Image files continue to grow in size so I have to compress them occasionally in Terminal (hdiutil compact "Name of file.sparseimage") or collectively they'd outgrow my 1TB drive.

Any chance a compression routine could be included in future versions of SD? I'm not a programmer but doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to (optionally) include the above UNIX command after the image is unmounted.