Stokkes Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 Hey all, Just testing leopard here on an older Powerbook before I upgrade my main machine to it and I was really looking forward to using Time Machine over a network (wirelessly). As per the forums here, people were saying that you could simply do a: touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported From the root folder of the mounted network drive (/Volumes/Path to drive/) and it would allow Time Machine to recognize the drive as a viable backup solution. Well, I didn't try the dev builds, but this isn't working in the boxed copy of Leopard I received today. It's quite annoying as I bought a LaCie 500GB drive to hook up over the network via either SMB or AFP for this sole reason and I'm running out of days to return the drive, so I'm really trying to figure out how to get this darn thing to work. Any experts want to chime in before I'm stuck with this drive for good and can't return it. (I refuse to be tethered to an external hard drive for backup purposes, wireless or nothing for me). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 check the permissions? on my time machine drive, the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file's permissions are: -rw-r--r-- and is owned by root/admin. i will be trying this myself later tonight because OTA backup is what i want too... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stokkes Posted October 25, 2007 Author Share Posted October 25, 2007 how is your drive connected? Mine's an HFS formatted drive connected to a Ubuntu server and accessed on Leopard via AFP (netatalk) on Ubuntu. For some reason, I can't change the permissions (even doing a sudo chown root:admin on that file, it says operation not supported). Hmm.; Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stokkes Posted October 25, 2007 Author Share Posted October 25, 2007 Well I've been messing around with this for a few hours Using AFP or Samba (haven't tried NFS) Changing permissions on the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file I can't get this to work :/. I wonder if this work around was a developer feature only and nuked on the GM build. If anyone has any success, please, please post it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 im trying an NTFS volume mounted via SMB share.. doesnt seem to work, and i cant change permissions on the file (i get no error, but the permissions/owner does not change). now creating a disk image on the share, will try that and report back. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 meh.. cant get it to work, tired too - going to bed! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stokkes Posted October 25, 2007 Author Share Posted October 25, 2007 ugh. This is very very disappointing. I'm about to blow a gasket and go postal on the 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA later tonight. even if I have to take a plane from canada to do it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natefrogg Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 this truly sucks, there has got to be a work around of some sort my plan was to have a san with afp share, and have all of our design personnel backing up to our san, this smashes my lil plan to bits, blah, i'll have to toss internal drives in each and every one of these mac pros and then pull my own non-timemachine backups off their internal timemachine drives, bollocks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted October 26, 2007 Share Posted October 26, 2007 I've been thinking about this a bit more, and I realised there's more to it. From this post: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10...html&page=2 "Time Machine does something new and different that actually required Apple to make changes to the underlying Mac file system, HFS+. The new change is referred to multi-links, which are similar to "hard links" common to Unix users and potentially available when using NTFS on Windows." Thus, HFS+ has changed in Leopard. This would explain why network backups need to be to a Leopard (not Tiger, or Airport) machine. I suspect the Airport Extreme will need a firmware update to support the 'updated' HFS+. But how do older, Tiger-formatted HFS+ drives work with Time Machine? I suspect that the mere act of connecting them to Leopard somehow enables the new features of HFS+. Finally, there is a workaround for backing up to an Airport Disk, posted here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p...mp;postcount=50 I think the fact that you need to connect it directly to the Leopard machine would explain why it works, and fits with my theory outlined above. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manitoba98 Posted October 26, 2007 Share Posted October 26, 2007 I suspected that was the source of the concerns (the new "multi-links" features isn't supported in most protocols), but riddle me this: why did it work in the betas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stokkes Posted October 26, 2007 Author Share Posted October 26, 2007 That was my question too.. Why did it work in the previous build? The only thing I can think of (and can't verify anymore) was that although the previous builds worked, instead of creating the multi-links to the files, it was actually duplicating the files when backing up (and thus exponentially growing your backup?) Again, I can't verify this, but someone who ran the previous build with TM over an SMB connection may know more. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manitoba98 Posted October 26, 2007 Share Posted October 26, 2007 Yeah, that's my best guess, too. It should still be a hidden option to restore the old behavior, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
realfolkblues Posted October 26, 2007 Share Posted October 26, 2007 here are all the files shown on the drive if you plug it in via usb. Maybe this will help to make it work over network? .001b639f602e .com.apple.timemachine.supported .DS_Store Desktop DB Desktop DF Folders .fseventsd .HFS+ Private Directory Data .Spotlight-V100 .Trashes Backups.backupdb <---this is where the data is stored. I'm going to try recreating the files on my nas and see if they work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stokkes Posted October 27, 2007 Author Share Posted October 27, 2007 Engadget's Ryan Block indicates that he spoke to Apple and Time Machine WILL work with any drive over AFP. Now, on Linux, we have "netatalk" which provides AFP, so I think this is where we need to start. Here's the link: http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/25/weve-go...know/2#comments Ryan also posts a comment on that page indicating he spoke to apple and also someone who got it working on a base station. I'll start playing more with AFP's settings to see if I can get this to work. But I believe SMB/NFS/anything that isn't AFP is a lost cause, but definitely, if you find something, we need to know. I'm about ready to return my external drive I bought specifically for this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lilmoonee Posted October 27, 2007 Share Posted October 27, 2007 Found a solution. First you need a supported usb/firewire hard drive. Setup the time machine with that hard drive and cancel the first backup. Now setup the afp network to have the same name as your hard drive and connect to it. now open up terminal and run these commands. cd /volumes/[hard drive volume name]/ ls -a -l Now look up to the list of files. There should be 12 character file that starts with a '.' example .0016fed52916 sudo cp /volumes/[hard drive volume name]/[12 character files with leading '.']/ /volumes/[hard drive volume name] 1/ sudo cp /volumes/[hard drive volume name]/.com.apple.timemachine.supported "/volumes/[hard drive volume name] 1/" Now disconnect the hard drive and time machine should detect the network share a the backup device. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exscape Posted October 27, 2007 Share Posted October 27, 2007 Engadget's Ryan Block indicates that he spoke to Apple and Time Machine WILL work with any drive over AFP. Now, on Linux, we have "netatalk" which provides AFP, so I think this is where we need to start. Here's the link: http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/25/weve-go...know/2#comments Ryan also posts a comment on that page indicating he spoke to apple and also someone who got it working on a base station. I'll start playing more with AFP's settings to see if I can get this to work. But I believe SMB/NFS/anything that isn't AFP is a lost cause, but definitely, if you find something, we need to know. I'm about ready to return my external drive I bought specifically for this. Doesn't work over AFP for me. Granted, I don't run HFS+ on the linux box. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wingchun Posted October 27, 2007 Share Posted October 27, 2007 may be it can be usefull for someone http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=375047 regards Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hazkid Posted October 27, 2007 Share Posted October 27, 2007 So, I take it a Lacie BigDisk Ethernet isn't going to work? Even though the drive has a USB-out, it still only connects over a USB network. Therefore, no time machine. Thanks for screwing me out of $300, Apple. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stokkes Posted October 28, 2007 Author Share Posted October 28, 2007 I don't have AEBS, but I wasn't able to get this over AFP to my Linux server (on both a drive with ext3 and HFS) Would like feedback from others who may have tried with on a linux/other server using AFP (netatalk) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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