Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS

bollar wrote:

sirozha wrote: I would still like Netgear to respond to this. You guys probably realize without me saying it that your ReadyNAS beats Time Capsule hands down. As an Apple investor I am saddened by that, but as a ReadyNAS aficionado for 3 1/2 years now, I am very happy for the ReadyNAS. The TM backup as an officially supported feature is a huge plus for ReadyNAS products, and this should really drive your sales up with Mac users. However, as I have mentioned before, we need to know that the TM restores are reliable enough so that we can lose the constant worry of how we are going to restore our Macs if they crash. So, do you guys think you can spend a couple days in your lab to test out TM restores, and then published instructions on how to do this? Not many people want to sacrifice their Mac to try TM restores at home before the hard drive actually crashes. However, if Netgear tests this out in the lab and publishes official instructions, I will tend to believe that in case of the catastrophic failure of my HD, my TM backups will save me. So, I had the drive on an iMac fail yesterday and I can report that the ReadyNAS Time Machine backup looks just like a Time Capsule backup to a new Mac. I replaced the drive on the iMac, booted using a Leopard OS DVD and after Leopard installed, it gave me the normal restore from backup options. I selected Time Capsule and the ReadyNAS appeared in the resulting list. Selected the NAS and entered the username "ReadyNAS" and password and it continued as normal.

This is good stuff! Were you running the firmware on the ReadyNAS that had the official support for Time Machine backups? I figured so because you said that you had to supply the username ReadyNAS when you were restoring.

I have never installed Mac OS X from scratch - I have only had Macs for a year, and I am way to busy at work to mess with my Macs' OS at this time. However, I am about to buy a new Macbook Air for my wife, and I may just install the OS on the new one from scratch when I buy it and then I want to try to restore the backup of her current Macbook Air to the new one.

My questions:
Is it possible to restore the backup made on one system to another system?
Is there any good paper on how Time Machine backups work with Time Capsule?
You mentioned that you had to first install the OS before you were able to restore your Time Machine backup from the ReadyNAS. Is there an option to restore the entire computer, including the OS, when you install a brand new hard drive, or do you HAVE to first install the OS?
Once you installed the OS, how did you get to the "restore from backup" options? Is this a wizard that the installation of Mac OS runs automatically, or do you have to do something to launch it?

In other words, since you seem to be the only one here who has recently restored from a Time Machine backup hosted on a ReadyNAS, do you mind writing up the sequence of steps in as much detail as possible?

Thank you very much!