Backing up to NAS drive on Mac

Messiah Khan · 20 Aug 2007 at 09:22

At work we use 4 Mac Pros for video editing. I have just bought 2 x 'Western Digital MyBook World II 1TB' NAS drives to act as archive backup drives. Ive managed to get them hooked up and accessible from any of the Macs but there is a slight problem. The Macs don't seem to be too fussy about naming conventions. However when I try and copy stuff over to the NAS drives, they complain about the filesnames being too long. I could manually rename them, but as I need to backup 2Tb of files, this isn't really an option.

I think if I was to actually archive the files (in some sort of zip folder) then this would work as the long file names would be contained within a shorter named zip file. But all the arhive programs I have found for the Mac are rubbish. Due to the nature of the files I will be arhiving, I need to be able to restore individual files. The archive programs I have tried only allow you to restore the entire archive.

So my question to you all; Are there any Mac backup/zip programs that act in a similar way to winzip on the pc? (ie allow you to browse the contained files and folders) or is there anyway around this short filename limitation on the Western Digital MyBook World II?

Messiah Khan · 20 Aug 2007 at 09:59

DJLOREY said:
Stuffit Expander.

Grab it on http://www.versiontracker.com

Im sure we tried this one. Are you sure you can 'unarchive' individual files from withing the archive? Having a look about, it seems StuffIt Deluxe might do what we need, although its a bit pricey.

Messiah Khan · 20 Aug 2007 at 12:49

DJLOREY said:
I assume you're using a FAT32 filesystem then?

My other suggestion was (if you don't need Windows machines to access the backups) you could always reformat the NAS drive using OS X (journaled) filesystem.

This would allow a longer filename for the files, and would be better if you're exclusively using Mac Pros

One thing to be warned of though, is that some NAS's i've worked with don't like you to format the drive, although I can't see WD being a problem.

Im not sure what filesystem the Nas is using at the moment, but it does use a not so friendly UI. Reformating it would be an option, altough I suspect this could create more problems that it solves as im not sure where the NAS OS (Modified version of MioNet apparently) is stored. I'll have a look into this option though.

Messiah Khan · 24 Aug 2007 at 13:17

In the end I solved it using simple Rsync. Looks like its done the trick.