Create disk image over AFP ?

To backup my workstation drive onto my server, I wanted to have the
server mount the workstation's drive over AFP and then use the disk
utility to create a local (to the server) .dmg file (with compression on).


The server had no problems mounting the desktop's drive with AFP. But
Disk Utility did not show that drive in the list of drives.

Is this an architectural/design restriction, or would Disk Util on the
server be able to manipulate the desktop's disk if I enabled "root" on
the desktop and used "root" credentials to mount the disk over AFP ?


Would dd or some other command line utility be able to have the server
perform a full disk backup to a compressed .dmg ? Or is there absolutely
no way around to have the .dmg created from the desktop ?


Creating compressed .dmg takes a lot of CPU so I'd rather have it run on
the server. Goal is to have an image of drives that could be used to
restore to a new computer after some sort of disaster.

..dmg is easier to recover from on any machine than the proprietary
format used by time machine.

In article <4f4a9f1f$0$24324$c3e8da3$ om>,
JF Mezei <> wrote:

> To backup my workstation drive onto my server, I wanted to have the
> server mount the workstation's drive over AFP and then use the disk
> utility to create a local (to the server) .dmg file (with compression on).
>
>
> The server had no problems mounting the desktop's drive with AFP. But
> Disk Utility did not show that drive in the list of drives.
>
> Is this an architectural/design restriction, or would Disk Util on the
> server be able to manipulate the desktop's disk if I enabled "root" on
> the desktop and used "root" credentials to mount the disk over AFP ?
>
>
> Would dd or some other command line utility be able to have the server
> perform a full disk backup to a compressed .dmg ? Or is there absolutely
> no way around to have the .dmg created from the desktop ?
>
>
> Creating compressed .dmg takes a lot of CPU so I'd rather have it run on
> the server. Goal is to have an image of drives that could be used to
> restore to a new computer after some sort of disaster.
>
> .dmg is easier to recover from on any machine than the proprietary
> format used by time machine.

It sounds like you want to create a block-level copy from a logical
filesystem. That's not going to work.

Try it the other way around. Mount the server's drive on the
workstation and have the workstation write its own disk image to the
server.
--
I will not see posts from Google because I must filter them as spam

In article <4f4a9f1f$0$24324$c3e8da3$ om>,
JF Mezei <> wrote:

> To backup my workstation drive onto my server, I wanted to have the
> server mount the workstation's drive over AFP and then use the disk
> utility to create a local (to the server) .dmg file (with compression on).
>
>
> The server had no problems mounting the desktop's drive with AFP. But
> Disk Utility did not show that drive in the list of drives.
>
> Is this an architectural/design restriction, or would Disk Util on the
> server be able to manipulate the desktop's disk if I enabled "root" on
> the desktop and used "root" credentials to mount the disk over AFP ?
>
>
> Would dd or some other command line utility be able to have the server
> perform a full disk backup to a compressed .dmg ? Or is there absolutely
> no way around to have the .dmg created from the desktop ?
>
>
> Creating compressed .dmg takes a lot of CPU so I'd rather have it run on
> the server. Goal is to have an image of drives that could be used to
> restore to a new computer after some sort of disaster.
>
> .dmg is easier to recover from on any machine than the proprietary
> format used by time machine.

You might try SuperDuper. While I do not use a compressed image,
I have been using SuperDuper to backup into a .sparseimage on an
AFP mounted server volume. I've been doing this for years.

I've also used Carbon Copy Cloner to backup to another Mac over
the network. However, in this case, it just copies all the files
to a specified subdirectory tree on the remote Mac.

And another network backup method is using CrashPlan (free if you
use your own systems).