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Time Machine over SMB Share to NAS

Discussion in 'Tech Support' started by Dave Penguin, 4 Jul 2008.

  1. Dave Penguin

    Dave Penguin O hai.

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    So, finally took the plunge and put Leopard on my Mac Mini. So far, it's absolutely fantastic - but being a bit of a "Completionist" when it comes to software and PCs, I really want to get Time Machine working.

    Unfortunately, I'm not *quite* crazy enough to splash out on either a Time Capsule or a separate external HDD specifically to back up the mini. I do however have a NAS drive currently configured on my network.

    It's a 500gb "IcyBox 901" - it's a small linux based NAS drive, which shares files through FTP and Samba. The drive is currently formatted as FAT32. The Mac Mini, my Main PC, and some other devices are connected to it through a gigabit switch in my room. This in turn is connected to my Linksys wireless router, which is handling all NAT and DHCP functions.


    So - so far, I've easily managed to mount the Samba shares under OSX - no problems there: in fact, my iTunes library is running off the NAS, nice and speedily too. I've also found the console command to let Time Machine view "unsupported drives", so my Samba share appears in the Time Machine target disk list.

    However - every time I've run the backup, it "prepares" for the backup for a good 3 minutes, and then fails. The message I get tells me that time machine is "unable to mount the target volume". This is strange, seeing as the volume is technically already mounted.

    I've searched through a number of other sites and forums, including this one, and even tried the trick of creating the SparseBundle disk image with the correct name and size, and placing it on the NAS drive, but to no avail.

    My main question then, is this:

    Does anyone else have Time Machine working on a Samba Share formatted as FAT32? If so, how did you go about setting it up?

    Any help would be massively appreciated, as it's really bugging me so far. Bonus points for living close enough to let me buy you a thank you pint or four.
     
  2. Glider

    Glider /dev/null

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    Wild guess (don't know anything about Time machine), but maybe it needs to be umounted? And also check if the mountpoint where Time Machine wants to mount it exists.
     
  3. GreatOldOne

    GreatOldOne Wannabe Martian

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