Time Machine & Network Drive.
NOTE: SMALL UPDATE FOR SNOW LEOPARD USERS. KEEP THIS UPDATE NEXT TO THIS POST
Just bought a network disk last week to backup some stuff on from my dads computer. But instead of buying a normal external USB drive, I decided to buy a network drive so I could use it myself.
After some research I choose for the Lacie Network Drive. It has a simple web interface for configuration purposes and it’s accessible through AFP, SMB and FTP.
For Windows/Linux users, SMB would be enough, but since I work on a Mac, I needed the AFP protocol.
Leopard is a great OS and it has many great features. One of it is Time Machine. Time machine takes hourly snapshots of your disk and lets you browse through your backup history to recover lost files.
By default, Time Machine only backups to external drives connected trough USB. But I found out it’s pritty easy to let it automatically backup to a network drive.
First, enable unsupported volumes in Time Machine. This can be done by opening Terminal and enter the following command:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Now when you want to select a disk, your network drive should show up in the list. But that’s not all. For some reason, Time Machine is unable to create the initial sparcebundle. Well, it actualy starts creating it, but during the process, it just fails. So, we just create it ourselfs.
Go to Disk Utilities and click on “New Image” with the following settings:
- Save As ComputerName_MACAddress (some say you can choose the name yourself, but I didn’t want to take any chanses.
- Change partition to “No Partition Map”
- Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”
- Custom Volume size. Set the maximum you want to use on your remote location. Don’t worry if you don’t have the room on your Mac. Sparce Bundle Disk Images grow in size dynamically.
- Create it and move this file to your network drive.
Now, go to the Time Machine interface again and tell it to start backing up. Now Time Machine should start backup your stuff to your network drive. It should even do so every hour automatically. When you are on location, and Time Machine can’t access you drive, you won’t get any errors. It will just retry every hour.
You might find posts where people say that backing up on unsupported drives is a stupid idea and it is unreliable, but untill today, I haven’t found any problems. I even recovered a few files for testing and it worked perfectly. But even so, don’t shoot me if something goes wrong.
I just had one small problem when my router assigned a new IP to the network drive. Time Machine didn’t seem to find the drive anymore even when it was showing up in Finder. So I just fixed the problem by assigning the IP myself (not through DHCP anymore) and problem solved.
Antonie Said,
July 2, 2009 @ 10:34 am
Hi,
I have a Lacie Network Drive, have followed all your steps, but for some reason reason it still won’t work. It will see the the network drive & it’s subdrives, but will fail when preparing.
Am totally stumped, any idea how to solve this?
D@ Mick Said,
July 2, 2009 @ 11:02 am
Hi,
are you using AFP instead of SMB and did you make the Sparce Bundle Disk Image correctly?
Also, check if the Sparce Bundle Disk Image has the proper name. When you try to make a TimeMachine backup, without creating the sparce bundle itself, TM will try and make it itself but will fail. But during the time that TM is trying you can see how it names the sparce bundle. Just copy the name and use that name for creating your own sparce bundle image.
Hope it helps
Antonie Said,
July 2, 2009 @ 11:26 am
I have created a properly named Sparse Bundle Disk, and have copied it to my Lacie Network Disk Mini.
Not quite sure how the AFP vs SMB is set up? Do I do that on the Administer page of my network drive?
D@ Mick Said,
July 2, 2009 @ 11:51 am
Hi,
mine is a normal Lacie Network Disk (not the mini). When you go into finder and you see your Network Disk, don’t you get 2 enties (one called “Network Disk SMB” and one “Network Disk AFP”) ?
SMB stands for Samba (windows sharing protocol) and AFP (Apple Filing Protocol). As far as I know, Time Machine only works over AFP, so if your Lacie network disk doesn’t support the AFP protocol, it won’t work.
Antonie Said,
July 2, 2009 @ 12:07 pm
Ah, it does support AFP, have been googling on that & come a bit closer again. Apparently, my AFP server has a corrupted database file, which I’m now trying to sort out. However, it doesn’t seem to be working. Am going to reset the drive & see if works then.
And the mini doesn’t automatically show two entries, though when I connect to it’s direct IP address through Finder > Go > connect to server the AFP version won’t work, while the SMB version does.
D@ Mick Said,
July 2, 2009 @ 12:22 pm
Maybe it doesn’t show up because of the corrupted database file that it doesn’t show up. Also check the admin page and see if AFP is enabled.
Antonie Said,
July 2, 2009 @ 12:42 pm
Any idea where in the admin page I could find that? Been looking ALL over…
D@ Mick Said,
July 2, 2009 @ 12:44 pm
I’m at work atm. Gonna have a look when I get home.
Antonie Said,
July 2, 2009 @ 12:47 pm
Thx so much for your help!
I’m assuming the admin page is the same for both the mini and the regular, though right?
Lacie helpdesk aren’t very supportive at the moment.
Thomas Said,
August 15, 2009 @ 11:54 pm
I’ve tried doing this numerous times and can’t get it to work. The network drive is being shared via a Windows computer (formatted HFS+). I create the sparse bundle image, copy it to the network drive, then run the backup. After a few minutes, I get a “Failed to mount disk image” message. Any suggestions?
D@ Mick Said,
September 3, 2009 @ 7:18 pm
Hmmm, strange. I got the same problem a few weeks back after I’ve shut down my Macbook during backup. When I restarted and TM wanted to take a new backup, I got the same message. The only thing I did was recreating a new sparse bundle and retake all my previous steps.
Maybe the problem lies with the fact that you share your drive through a windows computer. Are you sure you use the right protocol (AFP) when you share your drive?
Greg Said,
September 16, 2009 @ 6:11 am
Great post. I’m having the same problem though: even when I copy the sparsebundle up on the shared drive, TM still tries to create it…and invariably fails. Frustrating, seems so close to working!
D@ Mick Said,
September 19, 2009 @ 11:17 am
Hi Greg,
are you sure you have named your sparsebundle correctly?
I know it might sound stupid, but I didn’t do anything special besides what is described in this post.
Greg Said,
September 20, 2009 @ 12:28 am
Yes, I’ve named it right. Not sure what’s happening, it tries to write another sparsebundle with the same name…
I’ll let you know if I get it sorted, thanks for the post and the response!
D@ Mick Said,
September 20, 2009 @ 10:25 am
Hi Greg,
this could be a long shot, but maybe check the sparsebundle file permissions. Maybe they need to be set otherwise.
Greg Said,
September 22, 2009 @ 5:25 pm
Great thought…I’m not at my desk right now but it could definitely be something like that. Will keep you posted – you seem to like a challenge as much as I do!
Craig Woods Said,
November 4, 2009 @ 12:30 am
Im trying this and getting time machine going, it creates the tmp.sparsebundle but fails. I wonder if im not using the correct name when creating the original sparse bundle. Im must admit to not being clear what to enter when you say
Save As ComputerName_MACAddress
I assume the computer name is the name I have for the hard drive under devices in the finder window. Im not clear what the MACAddress is, is this the computer ip address? can you clarify, thank
Craig
D@ Mick Said,
November 6, 2009 @ 12:25 am
Hi Craig
let me try to clarify this for you.
As far as I know, the name of your sparcebundle needs to have your computername and nic mac address. A mac address has nothing to do with Apple Mac. It is a unique identifier assigned to your network card.
To get that information, click on the apple icon and select “About this Mac” . Then click on the “More info” button. The name of your mac will appear in the top left corner.
To get your mac address. Click on the “Network” section in the left side content table. You can either select the “Airport” service of “Ethernet” . Both of those selections will show you your Ethernet MAC address. It will be in the form of: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx .
Now you have to combine the two of them. Lets say you have a macbook with the name “Craig Wood’s MacBook” and your network card has 12:34:56:78:90:11 as you MAC address, your sparsebundles name would be like “Craig Wood’s MacBook_123456789011.sparsebundle” (without the quotes).
I hope this will help you out. I’m allready running this setup for about 5 months without problems. (TimeMachine helped me out a couple of times by giving me back access to some files that I threw away but still needed).
I’m still running MaC OS X Leopard (10.5.8) , but I guess the procedure will remain the same for Snow Leopard. I’ll be able to tell you for sure hopefully next week when my new Mac Pro Octo Core gets in.
Aaron Said,
November 7, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
The problem I am having is that time machine keeps creating a sparse bundle with ‘tmp’ in the name. Should I add this to the sparse bundle that I created? Also, when creating the sparse bundle, should I do anything with the “volume name”? or just leave it to whatever default disk image gives it?
Also, when you say to check the permissions, do you mean that everyone and the primary user should have read and write access? I noticed that the tmp sparse bundle time machine creates has no access, should I change mine to be the same?
Thank you so much for helping all of us with this!
Aaron Said,
November 7, 2009 @ 5:48 pm
Okay. I am very stupid.
Here is how I made it work.
My MAC address was wrong. In system information it doesn’t display a MAC address for the airport card for some reason, so I had chosen my ethernet NIC. No good. You can try doing an ipconfig in terminal, or, just copy whatever the MAC address is that time machine tries to create it self. Forget about the .tmp. thing, it doesn’t matter, ignore it. Once I did that, I suddenly had problems creating a disk image bigger than the local hard drive on my laptop that I want to be able to use time machine. The problem is that I forgot to create the image in the order suggested above. You cannot set the custom size until after you’ve selected sparce bundle. Also, you cannot create the image across the network, you have to create it locally then move it to the drive on your server.
These are all in the directions, I just thought I was being fancy trying to skip steps. The directions above are correct and work, I can confirm. Thank you!
Michael Said,
December 2, 2009 @ 12:59 pm
Great post! The challenge I am having is that the file that is being created has the ending “sparseimage” not “sparsebundle”.
Any idea what I am doing wrong?
Thank you.
clive Said,
December 12, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
need to make sparsebundle. Change partition to”No partition map” and you can then select sparsebundle
D@ Mick Said,
December 19, 2009 @ 4:06 pm
yes, just like clive said.
For those out there that are having problems with Snow Leopard, here is an update with some stuff I ran into.
http://www.lone-gunman.be/2009/12/19/time-machine-network-drive-snow-leopard-update/
Carlos Said,
January 3, 2010 @ 6:17 pm
Oh Wow, I Spend Almost All night trying to figure this thing out, it kept failing, i was reading the steps from another post, and finally after reading this one, i realize the problem was the quotation space on the mac address, the other post, didn’t mention anything about it, Thank you so much, Time machine backing up to my network drive as i’m typing this.
Atea Web Services Said,
January 8, 2010 @ 11:37 am
I want to backup from Powermac HD (Leopard) to Imac HD (Snow Leopard) and vice versa. Is that possible with this solution?
Thank you!
D@ Mick Said,
January 8, 2010 @ 5:07 pm
@Atea
I haven’t tested that method yet between my MacPro and MacBook but I don’t think that will work. Unless you are able to select the HD of your Mac while setting up TM to save the sparsebundle. But as far as I know, OS X doesn’t allow you to.