Apple Time Machine and Samba Network Shares - A Solution!

Yes, it's possible!!

Most of the 'solutions' I've seen so far involve a lot of faffing around connecting disks directly, doing all sorts of heroics in the terminal and finally doing a back-up... which (from what I've read) still isn't guaranteed to work.

Getting a bit miffed about it all, and thinking I'd have to sell my NAS and get something that would operate under AFP & HFS+, I stumbled across this gem:

Fire up terminal, and enter:

Code:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

I found it at this blog site:

http://www.freakymousemats.com/blog/posts/2007/11/01/time-machine-over-smb/

All it requires is the one command line above, and for you initially connect to the drive / share in the finder before you assign it in Time Machine, (otherwise it won't appear in the list of available drives) and that you've saved the user and password you need to connect to it in the keychain. It auto mounts the drive when it needs to afterwards.

I've got this set up, and after the initial multi hour back-up (copying 54Gb over even 100mb takes a looong time!), it's completed a couple of scheduled hourly back-ups whilst I was down stairs watching men cock about in crap cars in Africa followed by men cocking about on decent bikes in Europe & Africa.

I've now just confirmed that the back ups have been successful by deleting a few files, going into time machine (which is just plain old fashioned showing off in the UI dept ) and restoring the files.

That's saved me some dosh!

 

Pics or it didn't happen! :shifty:

And I'll take care of the money you saved for investment...

 

Pics, for Doubting Douglas...

The WD MyBook NAS Details, Which only supports SMB / CIFS shares as reported by Leopard


Time Machine prefs panel. TM JASON is an SMB share on the NAS


The SMB Share in the available drives list


To Infinity and Beyond!

 

Excellent post, will try this tomorrow.

Thanks!

 

You did it all just for this didn't you?

Now get back to your car

 

How well you know me...

There may be a slight wrinkle that needs ironing out though. I backed up my MBP via a cabled connection, and when I pulled the cable and turned the Airport back on, the backups seem to have stopped - the last being the hourly one done whilst it was still on the Cat5.

What Time Machine does is creates a HFS+ formatted Sparse Bundle Disk Image on the share, and backs up to this. The Sparse Bundle name has a string of hex in it, which (from what I've read) corresponds to the MAC address of the machine that's been backed up. Since I backed up via the built in ethernet port, it has that MAC address - which of course is different to the one of the Airport.

So, I'm guessing that if I change the name of the Sparse Bundle to include the MAC address of the airport rather than the ethernet port, it should be work.

I'll fiddle with it when I get back from work. If the worse comes to the worst, I'll just have to do the intial backup again overnight via WiFi.

 

No way to do a kind of "Change location" on it?

 

I dunno. I came in from work today, opened up the preferences for TM, and re-selected the backup location. It thought about it for a bit, did the 120 second countdown it does before a scheduled backup, and then did a small incremental backup over wifi (16Mb - took a couple of mins, tops).

Once it had finished, it left the next backup time field blank ("---"), so I thought it hadn't fixed the problem. I left it for a bit whilst I did a quick trawl of google for further clues, and when I cam back to the pane it was telling me the next back up was due for 17:32...

So I'm waiting to see what it does next. I'm in two minds as to whether there was a problem in the first place, and TM was a bit lax in updating the preference UI

More in a mo.....

 

Good to know this stuff, more and more people are getting macs, and I know my sister has just got one so I want to keep her stuff updated easy

 

Well, I'm now convinced that there wasn't a problem and I was just making it all up.

I've just watched it do a back up over wifi. It automagically mounted the back up location / sparse bundle, did the backup (you get a little spinning arrow icon next to the drive in the finder to show you the backup is in progress), and then unmounted the sparse bundle after it was done. Looking at the preferences, it shows the next backup to be an hour later (18:32).

So it's all working. Yay!

 

Good to know.

/me considers pointing microsoft to here

 

Whats this like over wi-fi then? Is the Time Machine UI incredibly slow?

 

Not that I've noticed. You only use the UI to restore - it's not used whilst the backups are taking place. I'm using it over 54g, and it seems to scroll back and forth through time smoothly, and searching for stuff in the different 'time frames' seems only a little slower than spotlight on the main machine. Obviously, the time taken to restore files will depend on the amount of files and the size.

It should be noted that you can't do a full restore over the network should you have a catastrophe that takes out your boot drive. You'd have to copy the sparse bundle over to an external drive and then plug that directly to your mac. Then you can restore via Time Machine after booting from the Leopard DVD.

 

Well that's two macines backing up now - My MBP pro and Mrs GOO's 12" Powerbook. Time Machine GUI works just as well on the PB as it does with the MBP which surprised me, due to the differences in GFX oomph between the machines.

Just my Mac Mini to go.

 

One final piece of the puzzle - it seems that you need to mount the share that the sparse bundle is on each time you start up your mac, but this is easily done by making the share a start up item.

 

Got my iMac backing up now (269.3 MB of 12.02 GB)

It's going through 54g onto my WD My Book, but I might just get a cat6 out to see if it wil speed things up.

 

WOW!!! It seems to be working for me as well.

Currently doing my first back up of 89gb I have a My Book World 1TB and have wired it to my MacBook Pro through CAT5 crossover cable.

Any speed comparisons with you guys, mine seems to take about 7mins per GB (thats wired!) so Im leaving my Mac on for the next 10 hours. Does this seem slow, I have the MyBook on RAID to be double safe, but is this slowing it down?

 

Nearly 8 hours after my last post an im on 79.37gb of 88.78gb

 

Fleeze - my 1TB Mybook is also in Raid 1, and it took about 8 hours or so to do an initial backup of 60Gb. So you're actually going faster than I did, but that's more than likely due to the fact that you went direct to the MyBook from the MacPro, so you'll be on Gigabit Lan speeds.

When I cabled my MacBook Pro up, I went through my Airport Extreme - the wired switch part of it only does 100Mbit, so it was throttled back a bit.

Koola - oh yes, it'll speed things up.

 

89gb Backup finally finished, and Time Machine has been backing up fine since then. Thanks for your help.

Off the point slightly but did you find anyway to remotely accessing your My Book as Mionet is for PC only?

Thanks