Comments on: Geeky: Get Leopards (10.5) Time Machine to Backup to A Network Drive

By: Peter Batty

Peter Batty — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 04:46:09 +0000

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).

By: Felix

Felix — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 07:56:44 +0000

I have been running Time Machine on an network SMB mounted partition for a couple of weeks (using the trick where you disabled the time machine disk check
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

)… I know it was a bad idea… but I have plenty of SMB space available at my lab, while no real hard disk (until today ;-) )

Everything went fine until today, where finally the disk filled up… and I got this in the console

20/11/07 15:10:42 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Trusting backup times for remote backups.
20/11/07 15:10:51 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Starting pre-backup thinning: 5.03 GB requested (including padding), 3.07 GB available
20/11/07 15:11:30 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-19-145728: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:11:30 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Removed all 1 expired backups, more space is needed – deleting oldest backups to make room
20/11/07 15:12:20 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-09-145354: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:13:08 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-12-085647: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:14:02 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-13-105151: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:14:57 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-14-094201: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:15:49 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-15-093340: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:16:58 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-16-091426: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:19:39 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-19-084944: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:19:51 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-19-160038: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:20:25 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-19-164736: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:21:14 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-19-174849: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:21:39 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-20-100005: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:22:07 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-20-104417: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:22:39 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-20-114450: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:23:00 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Zig/Backups.backupdb/Zig/2007-11-20-124449: 3.07 GB now available
20/11/07 15:23:00 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Error: backup disk is full – all 15 possible backups were removed, but space is still needed.
20/11/07 15:23:00 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Backup Failed: unable to free 5.03 GB needed space
20/11/07 15:23:01 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Backup failed with error: Not enough available disk space on the target volume.
20/11/07 15:23:03 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Ejected Time Machine disk image.
20/11/07 15:23:03 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[11539] Ejected Time Machine network volume.

Do you see where I am coming? this is already scary… it deleted ALL my backups, without recovering one byte… Jez… without a warning (despite the check box in the TM pref option pane)

Look at this:

This is the SMB partition:
[zig:~] felix% df -g /Volumes/felix/
Filesystem 1G-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
//felix@basso-cambo.laas.fr/local/users/felix 66 63 3 96% /Volumes/felix
[zig:~] felix% ls /Volumes/felix/
Zig_0017f2c89d46.sparsebundle/
[zig:~] felix%

[zig:~] felix% mount
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
fdesc on /dev (fdesc, union)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, automounted)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted)
//felix@basso-cambo.laas.fr/local/users/felix on /Volumes/felix (smbfs, nodev, nosuid, mounted by felix)
/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/Backup of Zig (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled, mounted by felix)
[zig:~] felix% df -g /Volumes/Backup\ of\ Zig/
Filesystem 1G-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk2s2 132 129 3 98% /Volumes/Backup of Zig

So the Backup partition pretend to use 129 Gig (weird as its containing SMB partition is 66 Gig big) and 3 Gig left…

[zig:~] felix% cd /Volumes/Backup\ of\ Zig/
[zig:/Volumes/Backup of Zig] felix% ls
Backups.backupdb/
[zig:/Volumes/Backup of Zig] felix% ls Backups.backupdb/
Zig/
[zig:/Volumes/Backup of Zig] felix% ls Backups.backupdb/Zig/
2007-11-20-141210/ 2007-11-20-151041.inProgress/ Latest@
[zig:/Volumes/Backup of Zig] felix% sudo du -sk .
Password:
35637816 .

But all the files on this partition amount to 35 gigs… (which is indead more or less the size of one backup)… where are the other 31 gig gone? My explanation is that the space has not been properly recovered after the old backups deletion… (which indeed also explains why backupd deleted ALL but one backups)

In any case, I would advise any SMB mounted partition Time Machine user to NOT rely completely on those backup. I will try to see if one can recover the space in a sparsebundle image… but even so, it makes the whole process dangerous.

You have been warned…

By: David

David — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 21:59:15 +0000

Thanks Vincent! I took your advice and successfully configured Time Machine to use my SMB share as a backup location.

I only wish Apple had been more forthcoming in the documentation and saved us all some time. I spent hours trying to figure this out before stumbling across this thread.

Thanks again!

-David

By: vincent van beek

vincent van beek — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:48:24 +0000

I used this last tip with a windows server and created a share and connected to it with SMB

and after running the command

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

it all worked fine

By: Duselette

Duselette — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:11:04 +0000

Hi, i tried also to get time machine working with an smb-share. I tried yopur tip, but it wasnt very succesfull (had to mount the sparseimage by hand before restoring :( )

I tried this tip, found bei macoxhints.com:
There is a hidden system preference that needs to be change. This can be done by typing the following command in the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

It works on my network (smb-share on an linux-server, time machine has ist own share), but you have to remove the hidden files you vreated in your tip. Or, make a seperate share for time machine.

Time Machine is backing up to this Share an i can restore Data like it should be. So long it works fine!

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:44:08 +0000

I can accept that at least for now Time Machine doesn’t support network drives and/or non-HFS formatted drives. What is totally inexcusable is that absolute nowhere in in Time Machine’s help docs does it say so. I wasted too much time trying to figure out why a connected network drive wouldn’t appear in Time Machine’s select backup disk box.

By: Howard

Howard — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:54:01 +0000

I’m backing up to an old G4 Mac Mini with one of those drobo drive robots attach to it. First TM didn’t see my drive then I figured I need to turn Journaling On… stupid me. And it’s taking forever backing up through the 10/100 ethernet port on the old Mini despite the gigabit network… Is this a scheme to get me to upgrade my Mini? :-$

By: Dary Barclay

Dary Barclay — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:33:26 +0000

It would be nice if someone (yes…I’m a greedy OS X user with next to no knowledge in programming) created some sort of little gui’d app for this hackery that you would also run as a login item to resave the preferences upon startup…..dare to dream.

By: Ian

Ian — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:18:17 +0000

Time machine is worthless to me now that they’ve removed encryption. I’ll just stick with paying $8/month for Amazon S3 and use JungleDisk.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:41:48 +0000

@ THECHEEKS:

you could create partitions on the drive in different file systems.

@ARTICLE:

it’s a bummer you can’t restart without losing the settings. I guess our only hope now is a 10.5.1 update or a Time Machine update.