using FMS 8, can i backup the files to a remote pc? I can only backup locally. Thanks.

On Windows you can, but it's not supported by FMI. And in general it's a bad idea. Have a look at the "Backups! More Backups!" white paper on www.connectingdata.com (downloads section) for an alternate approach.

On OS X I just do the Server scheduled backups to the default backups folder on the local drive, and then use a separate scheduled shell script to create a timestamped zip archive of the backup file. The shell script then proceeds to copy the zip archive to 4 different places. (One other internal drive, one external drive, one fileserver in the lab, and one in another building)

The only limitation I still can't work around is that to get the external drive and the file servers to mount as volumes, I have to have a user logged in. (I still lock out the screen using fast user switching to go to the login screen, but a user is still logged in.)

Any ideas on how to force these volumes to stay mounted when there is no user logged in?

Hi Reed, no need for mounting if you're using Windows sharing (SMB) on the remote volume. Then you can use the UNC format of the share without mounting it: servershareName

Your shell script will then have to use the "smbclient" command to authenticate to the share and write the file to it.

I tried to send a backup directly to the server with the FMS backup service, but I had an error saying "Not enough free space on destination" BTW why this error? I just bought a 320 GB drive for the server and I still get this error.

I decided to work around the problem. FMS does the backup on an external drive and I scheduled GenieBackup to send this backup to a backup server.

Does anyone know whether there is a way to similarly access afp shares in this way without having a mounted volume.

Otherwise I could set up my mac fileserver to enable either samba sharing or ssh and use scp to back up the files in the shell script.

Thanks for the smbclient tip Wim.

Dana