Howto convince MacOSX Time Machine to backup on Samba Network Share (Win/Linux)
- February 15th, 2010
- Posted in GeekLife . OS
- By Zerga
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- 1 Like
This evening i was trying out how to use Time Machine on my Mac. Unfortunately I am kind of short on external harddrives at the moment. Here is the full list of steps i did to make my Mac surrender and actually backup over the network onto my windows network share…
- Create a read/write windows network share on the target system.
- Mount the network share in your mac.
- Open a terminal in mac and enter “defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1” – this makes Time Machine accept non-local, non-HFS drives…
- Open Time Machine and voila: you see the network share.
- Select the network share and wait for the backup process to start. Observe the network share and copy the filename which is created by Time Machine, since we want to create this file for it. The process will end with an error. I found out that Time Machine is unable to create the so-called sparsebundle file.
- Open “Disk Utility” on the Mac and create a new image.
- Save your new image with the filename like the one created by Time Machine. The name should be something like “ComputerName_MACAddress.sparsebundle”. ATTENTION: The MACAddress HAS to be the MACAddress of the Ethernet, no matter which interface you use for backup. I was trying the backup over wifi and Time Machine created a file with the wifi MACAddress. For some reason this doesnt work. Its possible to backup over wifi, but use the Ethernet MACAddress in the filename. The volume name however can be whatever you like. Custom volume size must be the last value set.
- Change partition to “No Partition Map”
- Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”
- Set “Custom Volume size” to the maximum you want to use on your remote location. Dont worry, as your Mac doesnt have to have the required space available you can choose whatever is available on your network share.
- Save the image and move it to the network share.
- Start the Time Machine process again.
Voila! My backup seems to be running now (around 2% finished) and i will keep it running over night. In case anything goes wrong i will write it here. If you have any trouble, feel free to contact me… good luck!
After running defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1, I still cannot see the shared network drive in either browse other back disks or selecting time machine preferences and select other backup disk..
Drive has been shared on the PC, and mounted via finder->Connect to Server->SMB://Machine/Share and is accessible with read/write access.
Ideas?
Thanks.
Malcolm
@Malcolm
I can just throw in some more ideas what I would try: first of all make sure you try also with “sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1” just to be sure.
Also make sure that you close and open your preferences completely after you did this (seems to makes TM refresh – an even safer option would be a reboot).
And for OSX Lion and newer, be sure to follow my other post here: http://www.zerga.de/wordpress/2011/10/13/howto-get-macosx-lion-time-machine-to-backup-on-a-samba-share
If all this fails, you can try to skip this step and jump to building the sparsebundle first. The name has to be ComputerName_MACaddressWithoutColons.sparsebundle and put it into the share that you can mount in finder (connect to server…)
Then go to the terminal and run:
hdiutil attach -verbose /Volumes/sharename/sparsebundlefile
The sparsebundle is now mounted into /Volumes. Add the sparsebundle as the Time Machine destination:
sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/mounted_sprase_bundle_name
After typing /Volumes/ you should be able to display all possible folder names by hitting TAB.
Any luck?