Good points...sorry for my confusion!
 

I'm not in love with any backup program I've ever seen, unless using CCC to a FireWire drive counts. You're right that Retrospect leaves as much to be desired as the rest, but it DOES work in a mixed networked environment and isn't god-awful expensive.

Sorry about my confusion over VDD...I was actually WAY back in the 80s in my thinking on that one, for I was thinking of RAM-disks (which, way back when, had their use!), not the virtual drives created by things like Virtual PC (now it's my turn to despise a product!), so I was just confused, but I hope that explains my reference to RAM in my response.

It sounds like you'll get things working the way you need them to. Your thread just points out that hardware development is actually a lot faster than software, so we'll probably continue to run into barriers built into our operating systems, which the developers built under certain assumptions (often not that unreasonable) that have been superceded as the technical capacity of the devices increases and their relative cost decreases with each passing month. Best wishes on getting this system working properly!

Joe VanZandt

Thank you for the wishes and all your help, sir! :D

It looks like the Mac + the big drive = NAS. It turns out that I can't make partitions bootable if the disk was initialized on a PC so I basically re-init'ed the disk on the Mac, created some MacOS partitions and I'm going to share it via NFS, CIFS/SMB and AFP over the LAN. Oh well.