Apple Time Machine and Samba Network Shares - A Solution!

FTP, but that requires a hack to enable SSH then FTP -> first-steps-with-mbwe

 

I don't remotely access my MyBook, but as Koola says, activate SSH and then put FTP on it. I've just put SSH on mine, and installed a much friendlier text editor on it so I can modify config files via a terminal session

Why? I've diabled MioNet by removing it from the startup script, and got SSH to start every time the box reboots.

Now I have access, I'm trying to find a way to use smbcquotas to put an upper limit on the back up shares I've set up. That way no one time machine back up will hog up the drive (I hope).

The only problem is I found smbcquotas binary on the MyBook, but it doesn't want to run!

 

by this, do you mean that TM won't automatically mount the drive. for instance, if i set this up on my mac and often change networks between work and home, when i get back home, will i have to mount the drive each time i return home?

 

Has anyone been able to mount a samba drive from the Terminal app on the DVD install?

If we could mount the samba drive and the the sparse image, I guess we could see the samba drive on the Restore app on the Leopard DVD and be able to do a full restore from the NAS (could be long on my 750 GB drive...)

I'm able to mkdir /volumes/nas volume to create a mount point, but I get a 1022 error while trying to mount_smbfs //idswd@IP/nas volume /volumes/nas volume

That same function works in the finder if y try to mount my nas drive on the desktop.

My NAS is a D Link DNS-323.

 

Apparently 10.5.2 introduced some new bugs into the system. Whilst you can perform an incremental backup to a Time Machine image made in 10.5.1 or 10.5.0, you apparently can't create a new backup. Using the hack posted by GOO ^^^, TM will start for 10 minutes or so, and give you this error:

"The backup disk image could not be created"

Anyway, I think a bit of googling has found a solution, HERE:

I'm just trying it now. So far, so good. I just thought I'd update this thread for anyone looking to do this.

 

Thanks for that Tomm, good find.

 

Ok, so I've done the initial backup via ethernet cable. Then using wifi, I was having similar issues to GOO with Time Machine initially not recognising the sparsebundle (? because of a different mac address), saying it was "unable to mount the sparsebundle". However, I've fiddled a bit and unmounted and remounted my network share, and it seems to have now picked up the sparsebundle and mounted it (with a spinning icon next to it in finder as GOO described). However, the Time Machine status is stuck on 'preparing' and it doesn't seem to want to work.

Ideas?

EDIT: Patience is a virtue (especially when dealing with multi-gigabyte backups to a slow NAS). I just left it and it worked fine. It must have been indexing the drive or something but after two hours it had done its first incremental backup via wifi. Now, it takes just a couple of minutes to do an incremental backup.

I now have totally automated backups of my entire system, wirelessly. Don't you just love computers sometimes?

 

Reuse of existing Backups

Right that's what I figured out, too: You can't use your existing backups right away! But I found a how-to that describes how to reuse your existing backups over network. Here:
http://rolf.haynberg.de/?p=83

I thought it might be interesting to keep your backups

Regards

 

thanks for the post tomm , it is excellent find cheers

 

Normally i would not resurrect a thread this old. But current Apple updates have forced us to abandon old time machine shares.

Since this is the first hit on google i figured i'd update it a bit.

1) 10.6.4 has an update to timemachine that breaks old histories, thus when timemachine first tries to backup after your upgrade you'll be told you must abandon your old history, It'll happily tell you it can delete it for you.

Now, my backup is on a samba share, i didn't want to delete it, i figured i'd just make a new share and let timemachine start all over with that one..

Sadly it wasn't that simple, I created the share easily enough, but timemachine refused to create the new sparsebundle. This is how i fixed it.

1) Get your Macs name.
2) Get the Mac address of en0, even if you intend to use wifi.
3) Open a terminal, and make the new sparse bundle on the local hard drive, it'll fail if you try to create it over the network.

Code:

hdiutil create -size 300g -fs HFS+J [mac's name]_[en0 mac eg: 000102030405].sparsebundle

To my understanding the -size is the max size the sparsebundle will grow to.

4) Move it to the network drive

Code:

mv [mac's name]_[en0 mac eg: 000102030405].sparsebundle /Volumes/timemachine_current/

5) Point timemachine at the new share, it should verify the sparsebundle, and start backing up again..