Keeping a USB drive in sync with a NAS - can I do this?
 

I've been using SuperDuper! to make monthly image copies of my Mac to a Firewire drive. But now I'm wondering if I could use it for another purpose as well ...

I have a USB-attached Western Digital Elements drive that I use to keep all of my image files for working with Lightroom. I also have a network-attached Buffalo quad-drive Linkstation. On the Buffalo NAS I have created several virtual drive partitions using the Buffalo utility, one of which I use to keep a backup copy of the WD drive. It's a pain to try and keep these in sync manually and I was wondering if I could use SuperDuper! for this purpose?

Basically it's keeping the files of a non-bootable USB-attached drive in sync with the files of a virtual drive defined on a quad-drive NAS using a smart update.

Certainly I can just give it a try and see what happens, but a) I don't want to do anything stupid, like accidentally wiping the entire NAS, and b) I'd like advise as to the smartest way to set this up. And maybe there's some other way to keep files in sync that I haven't considered.

Thanks in advance for your opinions.

We can't write directly to a network drive, only to an image. I don't think that's likely what you want to do...

Thanks Dave. I wonder if I'm using the right terminology (I'm not all the fluent with Mac drives and disks) ...

Buffalo calls the partitions "shared folders". I have shared folders established for archives, backups, etc. One of these is called "Lightroom Backup". A utility called NASNavigator lets me mount any shared folder I want and it appears in finder as a disk image. So basically I open NASNavigator, click on the Lightroom Backup shared folder, and a disk icon appears called Lightroom Backup. I can then open this disk and manipulate the files as I wish.

So basically I see my USB-attached disk Lightroom, and my NAS disk Lightroom Backup, as disk icons and I copy files between them.

I did just open SuperDuper! with the Lightroom Backup drive mounted and it isn't showing up in the list of drives so I guess I'm out of luck.

Yeah, but it's still a network drive and not native HFS+. As such, we cannot copy to it.

okay, many thanks Dave!

Note that we can natively copy to iSCSI volumes formatted as HFS+, because they appear as local volumes and have normal HFS+ semantics. But they're usually not available on multiple systems at once.