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Using time machine with a NAS November 20, 2007

Posted by Björn in : backup, software , trackback

Leopard comes with Time Machine, an integrated backup solution. I’m quite impressed with the way Apple provides a decent backup strategy in such a user friendly manner. Actually, I still have to check how decent the backups really are, but the theory sounds good.

Unfortunately it doesn’t support backing up to network drives. This feature was present in early versions but dropped before release. However, it is possible to enable network support again. It’s not officially supported so if anything goes wrong you’re out of luck. I ‘m going to take the risk and see what happens.

On the Infrant Netgear forums I found a thread telling me how to make Time Machine use my ReadyNAS as a backup destination. If you don’t want to read the whole thread, here’s what I did.

  1. Create a new share on the NAS and enable AFP
  2. Execute this command in a terminal (all on 1 line): defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
  3. Run the above command again but this time without typos (hint: copy/paste).
  4. Browse to the share in Finder (Command-K, afp://server/share)
  5. Start Time Machine and choose the backup drive. The NAS share should be in the list.
  6. Let Time Machine do whatver it needs to do. It may look like it hangs at first but it’s preparing the first backup. After a while a progress window will appear.

That’s it. Right now Time Machine is making the first backup of my MacBook. That’s going to take a while because it’s copying 72 GB over a wireless connection. The incremental backups should be a lot smaller. For the next couple of days I’m going to keep a close eye on Time Machine and test its restore abilities. I hope it works as well as it looks good.

Comments»

1. Jason B - January 3, 2008

K – it’ s been a month and more…where is that update?

I’m curious to know if a restore worked.

Have you tried doing a full MacOS X install and restore using the time machine backup? Just to be sure it would be nice if you tried that if you’ve got a bit of time. I’ve heard some interesting info that would lead me to believe that not all the data would make it to the Time Machine backup store if done over wireless. Would be neat to know if true.

2. chris - February 6, 2008

How’s this working out?