[Guide] 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Time Machine backup to network share

[bm28]

Some bittersweet news folks.

After all this effort WD have released a new firmware that fixes this problem. Good job since i still could not get it to work.

 

Thanks to everyone who responded to me queries.

 

Cheers.

[sunkid]

Some bittersweet news folks.

After all this effort WD have released a new firmware that fixes this problem. Good job since i still could not get it to work.

 

That's good news! Can you post a link the the new firmware and a description of what exactly it fixed?

[bm28]

That's good news! Can you post a link the the new firmware and a description of what exactly it fixed?

 

Don't have the link but it's on the Western Digital website.

It fixes everything not being able to find the hardrive connecting the lot.

They must have Apple permission.

 

Cheers for the help Sunkid.

[RUok0101]

I am having the exact same issue hdavie listed above. I followed all the instructions to the letter and I do not see the backup drive in the Time Machine select disk window. It does however list all my SMB drives and the afp share in which the sparsebundle is on, but not the actual backup image.

 

Anyone else figured this out? I have been doing unix stuff for many years and re-executed every step 3 times and it still doesn't show up in the list.

 

I recently had a hard drive crash so I am anxious to get this set up. Its interesting to note that I had this all working on 10.5.x and it was working fine, and I even upgraded to Snow Leopard and my backups continued to work fine. Its just now that I am setting it up fresh (since drive crash) and its not working.

[redrum24]

Just want to add that the following configuration does NOT work:

 

iMac 10.4.11 with WD usb drive

MacBook 10.6.2

 

Usb drive is shared on the imac. Drive mounted on MacBook using AFP and the IP address of the iMac. The disk image was created using the requirements of the script provided. I also added in the .plist file with the MacBook UUID.

 

Time machine has stopped trying to make the sparsebundle image on the share. It mounts the Time Machine disk on the desktop of the MacBook then unmounts it quickly and says cleaning up.

[redrum24]

Update:

 

Same configuration as above.

 

Disabled personal file sharing on the imac and enabled windows file sharing. Installed sharepoints and created a SMB share for the attached USB drive. The disk image is still in place on the USB drive. Told time machine to use this drive as the backup drive.

 

It is now backing up, so there must be something with AFP and 10.4.x I hate to have to introduce windows style sharing to make this work but hey its better than nothing!

 

 

Just want to add that the following configuration does NOT work:

 

iMac 10.4.11 with WD usb drive

MacBook 10.6.2

 

Usb drive is shared on the imac. Drive mounted on MacBook using AFP and the IP address of the iMac. The disk image was created using the requirements of the script provided. I also added in the .plist file with the MacBook UUID.

 

Time machine has stopped trying to make the sparsebundle image on the share. It mounts the Time Machine disk on the desktop of the MacBook then unmounts it quickly and says cleaning up.

[Luc Lalonde]

This worked great for me! (Snow Leopard + Time Machine + Samba share)

 

Many thanks!

[TinFoil]

Soon as I add "defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1" then go to time machine to select the drive, system preferences freezes. If I change it back to 0, it works again. Any tips? Thanks in advance!

[Kaneda_ch]

Hi,

 

Just wanted to report that after trying (unsuccessfully) many different solutions, I followed your manual instructions and I now have Time Machine working on my 10.6.2 freshly installed onto a samba share on my Ubuntu server.

 

Thanks a lot for the plist tip !!

 

Regards,

[MacBenni]

not sure how some of you guys find this stuff. but nice job and thank you!!! now on to start a backup

 

This so great. Its working for me too.

Big thanks to all involved finding this out.

[drummer425]

[snip]

 

I know I'm about 3 months back on this, but you are a savior! Thanks for helping the community out.

[jjaayy73]

Yea, Thanks very much for your contribution. Also, thanks to Brent Friedman for the WHS version! MUCH APPRECIATION!!!

[hondaman]

Hello, I'm hoping someone can help me.

 

I've been trying to make this work for a few hours now, and I can't. I've followed the directions as close as I can, both manual and using the scripts, but when I start Time Capsule, then "Select Backup Disk", then "Set up Time Capsule" it then tries to Discover Apple wireless devices, then cant find any, and my only option is to rescan.

 

I am using samba with CentOS 5.4, and Leopard 10.6.2

 

EDIT: Stupid me. I forgot to run "defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1"

 

It's working now.

[SnapperNZ]

Thanks for this - just backing up now. DNS-323 NAS so no AFP out of the box and this 'hack' is easier than getting AFP running on the NAS. MUCH APPRECIATED - THANK YOU!

[billyg]

I've got this working on one laptop but when I run the script on a second I keep getting syntax errors - is there a configuration or installation that I need to do to get the script to run?

 

Sorry if it's a dumb question.

[Ah Ngau]

Thanks very much for sharing this! It works perfectly.

[Stefan Zemlicka]

You are my hero

[cafegeo]

I thought I had this down, but I constantly see the "making backup disk available" and then get error 45.

 

I created a sparsebundle typing exactly this("macbook" being my computername):

 

hdiutil create -size 300G -fs HFS+J -volname 'Time Machine Backups' -type SPARSEBUNDLE macbook.sparsebundle

 

I placed my UUID in this spot on the .plist file:

<string>YOURUUIDHERE</string>

 

Copied exactly the following to the "macbook.sparsebundle" file:

 

com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist

 

Then I moved the sparsebundle file to my WHS share(Time Machine Backups) and selected it in TimeMachine.

I connected to it, ran the backup and it gave me the error 45 message.

 

I would appreciate any help.

[melastudio]

My disk mounts and unmounts after few seconds...

I can't understand...

Any suggestion?

[Kaneda13]

I've got my image up and working, but Time Machine won't do auto backups. It will only work when i click "Back Up Now". it backs everything up just fine, however nothing ever shows in the Time Machine buddy Widget.

[timae]

Thanks for the work on this. I'm having problems getting my backup set up. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

I'm running 10.6.2 on my MBP trying to use TM to backup to a Drobo which is connected to a mac mini (shared). There is no problem what-so-ever in doing a simple TM backup in this way. The snag is that I want to LIMIT the size of the sparsebundle so that it does not take up the entire Drobo. I've tried the method described above, got the sparsebundle with the plist file successfully copied to /Volumes/Drobo. However, each time I try to initiate TM, it always creates a new sparsebundle and uses it instead. I let this go and tried to copy the backups.backupdb folder within the sparsebundle to the one I've created to limit size, however, it tells me that it cannot be copied because the drive is not case sensitive for a backup.

 

When creating the sparsebundle with the hdutil terminal command, its spits it out in HFS+J (Journaled) format. However, when TM creates its own sparseimage file on /Volumes/Drobo its in the (Case Sensitive, Journaled) format, which TM seems to require for the image to be used for backups.

 

My next step was to create a sparsebundle using disk utility instead of terminal (so that I could pick Case Sensitive, Journaled). This didn't work - seems to be a different process than the hdutil method as the resulting file size is much smaller when created through disk utility (27.2MB vs 449.5MB).

 

So - I'm out of ideas. Anyone have any?

[imercado]

MAJOR beating my head against the wall until I finally read one of the posts stating to run the following command:

 

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

 

I totally agree that this should be in the script. Those of you experts that already had this running before don't have to do this, but us NEWBs to Time Machine NAS backup land need it desperately!

 

FWIW, I got this up and running on a DNS-323 that I have also successfully installed netatalk on. However, I currently have it mounted with SMB and Time Machine is now happily copying files on over.

[mjones]

I've been beating my head against the wall off and on over the last week trying to get this to work.

 

You MAC computer name cannot have any spaces in it - it appears that Time Machine doesn't quote the sparse bundle name and you end up with

 

2/19/10 2:31:02 PM com.apple.backupd[435] Error 13 creating backup disk image

2/19/10 2:31:02 PM com.apple.backupd[435] Failed to create disk image

2/19/10 2:31:07 PM com.apple.backupd[435] Backup failed with error: 20

2/19/10 2:31:07 PM com.apple.backupd[435] Ejected Time Machine network volume.

 

I'm not positive, but I think I was having difficulties using Windows Domain credentials as well.

[etothemax]

Thank you. The script worked great and made the process much easier.

 

The upgrade to Snow Leopard breaks 10.5.x time machine backups configured with AFP shares on non-mac based network volumes as per these instructions, for example. After some trial and error, I was able to find out that the secrect lies with a hidden property list file that specifies the hardware UUID for the machine to be backed up. The following are some simple instructions to set up a new backup volume from scratch. They may work for upgrading a Leopard TM disk to SL, but I have not been able to verify this. Attached are a shell script that will do all the work for you and a property list file in case you want to try it yourself.

 

1. SETUP

 

If your time machine is already configured to backup to a networked AFP share, move on to the next step. Otherwise, follow the setup procedure in the link above.

 

2. SIMPLE PROCEDURE

 

Run the attached shell script with command line arguments specifying the maximum size for your backup image and the shared directory you want to backup to (the second argument is optional).

 

Example:

sh  ./makeImage.sh 600 /Volumes/backup

This will create a time machine ready disk image named with your computer's name with a maximum size of 600GB and copy it to /Volumes/backup. The image "file" (it's a directory, really) will contain the property list file that SL's TM needs.

 

If you don't specify the backup volume, you will need to do the coying yourself:

cp -pfr <computer name>.sparsebundle /Volumes/backup/<computer name>.sparsebundle

You may or may not have to execute the script and the copy command as root. I have not tried it out both ways and only done it as root.

 

3. "MANUAL" PROCEDURE

 

a. Create a disk image named with the name of your machine's computer name (not sure that this is crucial; you can find it in System Preferences -> Sharing). This example is for a 500GB (max size) image for a machine named snowy:

hdiutil create -size 500G -fs HFS+J -volname 'Time Machine Backups' -type SPARSEBUNDLE snowy.sparsebundle

b. Edit the attached com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist file and copy your machine's hardware UUID in the correct place. You can find your hardware UUID in the System Profiler

 

c. Copy the modified com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist file into your disk image directory:

cp com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist snowy.sparsebundle/

d. Copy your disk image file to your mounted backup volume. This example assumes an AFP share with the name backups:

cp -pfr snowy.sparsebundle /Volumes/backups/snowy.sparsebundle

 

Please let me know if you run into any issues. The attached script works for me but it may not work for you. I make no guarantees whatsoever!!

NOTE: remove the '.txt' extension from the attached files.

 

UPDATE 9/6/9: Fixed shell script to handle computer names with spaces.

UPDATE 9/24/9: We made it onto macosxhints.com

[deckeda]

… One important thing I learned from all the threads on this topic is that if you are backing up to a Mac OS machine running anything older than Leopard, you need to mount the backup share with SMB not AFP. For some reason TimeMachine is not able to keep AFP shares before Leopard mounted for backup. I have SharePoints on the iBook host an SMB share for the TimeMachine backups.

 

I *think* this is the only post that mentions a Tiger server actually working, as opposed to supposedly working? Can't get it to work here for a 10.4.9 Mac serving a 10.6.2 client. I have SharePoints on the Tiger Mac; even sharing the desired network drive as SMB still shows it connected and mounted via AFP when viewed from the 10.6 client. I have no clue what's going on there but will look into that more.

 

TM fails trying to "make available" or "preparing" the network disk with an error regarding a −1 copy of the network share. The .tmp sparsebundle mentioned before is also made during this process and then deletes. Before and after, adding the .plist file with UUID as shown in System Profiler produces the same result.