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Using Time machine with NAS drive
Ok, so I have a macbook pro, and though the time capsule drives are great, I don't have one. I

n3wm4c
Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:34:51 +0000

Ok, so I have a macbook pro, and though the time capsule drives are great, I don't have one. I have a buffalo technologies NAS drive. Now before we go into the plusses and minuses of that piece of technology, and I know there are a few of both, I want to share what I found regarding using a standard (non Apple) NAS as your time machine drive.

Firstly, it seems that using a non apple share isn't supported in Time machine, as you will notice if you try to set up Time Machine, you will not be able to see non apple shares in the time machine drive selection window. This was the first obstacle that I found, and found an answer to. The solution is to go into the terminal and enter this line -

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This will allow all shares to be shown in the Time Machine set up window. (Thanks to Engadget for this information)

The next issue I found was that it tries to create a sparseimage file on the share, this seems to be an issue on a non HFS formated drive (the buffalo are ext3). So, the solution I found was to set up Time Machine to backup to another share on another Mac, once this is done, I moved the sparseimage file over to the buffalo NAS, and selected the NAS as the Time Machine drive. Things have been fine since, and I have had no porblems browsing and / or restoring files from the time machine backups.

Some of you will otice that this might not be the easiest solution, and it also makes a full system restore a little difficult. I am open to other suggestions, and if you have implimented this one in an easier fashion please let me know. For the time being, this solution works, and seems to meet my needs.

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