Will Leopard’s Time Machine backup to a network drive?
I caught the very long and very informative Guided Tour of Leopard last night. Hey, what’s a geek to do when there’s no good television programming on and you’ve burned through all the recorded eps of Star Trek: Enterprise? It’s not like we could watch BSG since we have to wait another month yet! Wait, where was I. Oh yes, the Leopard tour…
One of the features I’m most interested in is the Time Machine backup functionality. I could care less about the pretty UI, it’s the requirement for an external drive that has me wondering. It makes perfect sense to have your data backed up to an external drive. After all: if your Mac’s internal drive fails, gets corrupt or just decides to have fun at your data’s expense, you’ll want your precious info somewhere else for the restore. When you plug in an external drive to a Leopard system, it asks if you want to use that drive for Time Machine. Very nice and very similar to how Vista asks if you want to use a flash or external drive for ReadyBoost. My question is: does that drive HAVE to be a physically connected external drive or can I use the 320 GB USB drive I hang off of my Apple AirPort Extreme router? Even more interesting: could you remotely backup and restore to a network drive at home while on the road? Seems like it should work, but I haven’t found the answer just yet…
I know the answer to the first question is yes. Jobs has mentioned before that a drive can be hung off the USB on an Airport Extreme and used to back up “all of the Macs in your house” using Time Machine.
I saw, but cannot remember where, that Time Machine works [test proven] on external and network drives as well as another partition, so it will probably also work on another internal drive. Seems similar to targeting another drive when using ‘Restore’ in the Disk Utility.
It looks like this feature have changed recently:
http://macenstein.com/default/archives/875
It states that the drive will have to be connected by FireWire or USB now.
I could be wrong… but as far as I know, the drive must be Mac format. And these ethernet/network/imbedded server (or whatever you call these things) drives are PC format.
Need an XRAID?
Sadly the biggest thing on my mind after this article is…
FRIGGEN SCIFI CHANNEL!!! Why have they ruined Friday nights with Odyssey 5 and Flash Gordon?! Why have they forsaken their cash cows of Stargate and Battlestar!? Their Friday nights rocked until they moved BSG off the Friday night lineup, and now that SG-1 is canceled, it leaves Atlantis on its own with two of the most craptacular shows I’ve ever seen.
Even with SG-1 canceled, they should be re-running Season 3 of BSG and Dr. Who alongside Atlantis while they ramp up to the premiere of Razor! Damn you, Sci-Fi Channel!
From the apple.com site (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html):
Pick a disk. Any disk.
You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.
So it looks like a remote machine with afp support should work too…
What about to a linux box? I have an old PC that I was thinking of setting up as a backup server (I would be nice to plop down in my normal spot on the couch and have backups automatically run to my server in the bedroom…) I haven’t checked in awhile, but can Linux mount hfs+ partitions?
Just installed Leopard. I cannot set this to work on an AFP mounted HFS+ drive. VERY disappointed by this. If it is restricted to USB & FW direct connected drives, the usefulness drops significantly.
Doh! The network drive has to be hosted from a machine running leopard or leopard server. Just have to upgrade the other system.
use globalsan iscsi and mount an iscsi disk using openfiler or other free iscsi target software. Works great!
Can you detail the operation? Thanks.
Using Leopard now, if you try to choose a backup location and only have networked drives (yes, Apple HFS+ mounted using AFP even, or SMB/FAT), then you have an empty list to pick from. Which in my book makes Time Machine pretty lame. So it looks like you have to have a drive physically plugged in to your Apple via USB or Firewire.
Even the clunky .Mac Backup program could cope with networked drives… not so much Leopard as a Turkey
I read on Ars Technica today that Time Machine uses Unix hard linking to files and directories (the latter of which is not normally allowed), so OS’s that aren’t Leopard might be very/dangerously confused by that, I figure. I’m sure the Linux geeks will hack a way eventually for NASed Time Machine.
I just got time machine working with my Western Digital MyBook World Edition!
The solution? (From http://www.freakymousemats.com/blog/posts/2007/11/01/time-machine-over-smb/)
Run the following terminal command to update a hidden preference:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Can you explain how you got Time Machine working with MyBook World Edition. I was unable to do it! I would really appreciate your help!
You can use a network drive attached to another Leopard machine, though setting it up seemed a little random for me. I have an iMac and a MacBook, both running Leopard, and am now backing up the MacBook wirelessly to an external drive attached to the iMac, using Time Machine. Setting it up seemed a little random. I first did a backup to the external drive directly from the MacBook, then attached the external drive to the iMac. When I first brought up Time Machine preferences on the MacBook after that, it said it couldn’t find the drive. If I picked the option to select a new drive it gave me nothing to choose from. Then I went and browsed the external disk in Finder, and suddenly noticed that the MacBook had now found the disk and was doing a backup (without me having selected anything new). There may be an easier way of setting it up, but the MacBook has been doing hourly backups across the network (which have generally been taking about ten minutes).
I had the issue of Time Machine not backing up to an Airport Extreme-linked external drive using Leopard (10.5.1). I tried the terminal command solution posted by James (October 30th) and it worked! Time Machine recognized my drive and created the first backup. Now, however, I cannot mount the external drive as a server. In fact, the Airport utility cannot even seen my Airport extreme! How can I return to the previous system preference setting using terminal? I’d rather have access to the drive and use other backup software for the time being.
Thanks,
Marty
hewlett@u.arizona.edu
I have a 1TB Ethernet MyBook World Edition, but can’t seem for the life of me to get either of my 2 Macs running Leopard to see the drive – whether plugged into the Airport Extreme, or directly to the machine. It was originally set up with my PC, could this be the culprit? Do I need to reset the drive & reformat? I followed the terminal command posted above, no luck – still not seeing the drive, therefore cannot mount it.
Help!
-Matt
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306652
all you need to know is here.