Leopard, Leopard server, and time machine.

Okay. First of all, I spent about 30 minutes searching through all the time machine questions here and found nothing like it so I'm sorry if its a duplicate question, but it does seem rather unique.
I have an XServe G5 running leopard server with an 8TB external firewire 800 RAID array that was purpose purchased to act as a time machine backup destination for about 8 machines.
XServe has that drive set up to be the backup destination, everything there is OK.
Here is what happens on the OSX Leopard machines when I go to backup:
1. I open Time Machine preferences.
2. I click on the "Choose Backup Disk..." button.
3. It thinks for about 10 seconds
4. It brings up a list of about 3 possible destinations. I select the one I want "Backups (XServe G5)"
5. I press the gleaming "Use For Backup" Button.
6. It asks for the users name and password. Type away.
7. It comes back to the 'Time Machine Preferences" window. The little on/off switch turned off, and we're back at the "Choose Backup Disk...." button.
This occurs on each machine I wish to backup, be they Mac Pros, or macbooks.
Help?

Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer.
I stumbled across this accidentally when I was playing desperately in the Finder trying to get some inspiration about this issue.
The problem doesn't lie in the clients... it lies in the Server.
Here is my solution:
1. In the finder, right-click on the external drive, and select "Get Info".
2. Under "General", there should be 2 little check boxes, "Shared Folder" and "Locked".
3. Click on "Shared Folder" to put an X in it.
Thats it!
For some reason Time Machine setup didn't share the folder and so the client machines recognised it as a shared time machine backup source, but couldn't actually find it on the network because it wasn't shared.
Have fun ladies and gentlemen!!

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I have found a number of articles about this when I search the error message. But by and large those articles have to do with folks building their own intel based machine and then running Mac OS X. Fixes involve messing around with boot files, etc - not something I really want to do.
Does anyone have a clue what might be going on and/or how to resolve this?
thanks

Howard Cohen wrote:
I am somewhat reluctant to do that as I tend to not want to change things that I don't understand.
Good! And since that refers to a way to run OSX on non-Apple hardware (in violation of the License), it probably wouldn't apply to your situation anyway.
I don't easily find specs of this server, but if it doesn't meet the requirements set by Apple, it may not work reliably with Time Machine. See: Disks that can be used with Time Machine.
And be careful here: just because some 3rd-party hardware claims to support Time Machine doesn't necessarily mean that Apple supports it, or that it will work in all circumstances.
First, since this is *unsupported by Apple,* there's nowhere to go when there's trouble. AppleCare will refer you to HP, who will refer you to Apple.
Second, you're risking a future update preventing it from working, and perhaps rendering your backups useless.
From a post in another forum (found by V.K.):
The technical reason why Apple limits Time Machine to 10.5 AFP volumes appears to be to prevent disk image corruption. There were additional features added to AFP in 10.5 to support Time Machine. These presumably allow the disk image engine to force disk image journal data to write out all the way to the disk. Without such features, a network interruption can result in a corrupted filesystem on the disk image despite journaling. Remember, journaling relies on the journal being written all the way to disk before the changes take place. If you can't guarantee that (e.g., because of network/NAS buffering) then the journal is useless. Time Machine appears to rely heavily on disk journaling to deal with network drop-outs, interrupted backups, and the like. Take this away and your data is at risk.
If the NAS you are using supports these features it should report them to the OS and you should natively be able to choose that volume. If you have to trick the OS to use the volume it means the NAS does not support it.
To summarize: if you care about your backup data you should avoid using non-natively supported AFP servers.

SL Server and Time Machine - Backups never finish - help.

I am running Snow Leopard Server (10.6.4) on a Mini. I want to use Time Machine to back it up to an external hard drive. This setup worked forever, until I upgraded to Snow Leopard.
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SL Server and Time Machine Mail backups

Hello all
We've recently taken on a client who previously used a SL Server for their mail. Unfortunately their previous IT guys have taken away the server and wiped it now. All we have is a hard drive with the Time Machine backups on it.
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Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then try the action that you're having trouble with again. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Understanding OS X Server and Time Machine backups

Never used Time Machine with OS X Server before. What happens if you use Time Machine to backup the server itself? Is it reasonable to expect TM to back up the Users directory, and any user homes that are set up, as well as the server's system, libs, etc? Or should users (even those with Network Home Folders) be expected to run Time Machine when they log in...recursively backing up to the the server they're logged into?
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Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then try the action that you're having trouble with again. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001OI2ZG4/
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is now a seperate "app" in Lion as opposed to being an
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Snow Leopard and Time Machine question

Running on snow leopard, trying back up files in order to upgrade OS using an external hard drive and time machine. Previously said "don't use" on accident with this hard drive; any way to reverse this?

Hello cinstar,
The following article provides steps for setting up Time Machine. The process of choosing a drive should not omit any drives that have been previously 'ignored' when first connected.
Mac OS X 10.6: Setting up and adjusting Time Machine
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH6299
Cheers,
Allen

Snow leopard and time machine

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Many thanks
scharamer

It may just be telling you about the latest firmware update.
Start AirPort Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder).
Click Manual Setup
Click directly on the word Status (2nd line) and AirPort Utility will indicate what's wrong.
If your network seems to be working OK, the flashing light might indicate that an update for your AirPort device is now available.

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Here's Apple's public statement at http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html for what devices work with TM.
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Hey All,
The whole reason I bought my airport extreme was to plug an external HD into and use it for backups. Then came time machine and Leopard, and now time capsule!!!
Does anyone know if you can use your airport extreme with an external HD attached and time machine in the same way as time capsule for wireless backups!??? The guy in the Apple store I spoke to says you should be able to if you mount the HD (a little cumbersome); I used to be able to mount the HD in Tiger, but cant in Leopard!!
Thanks!
Message was edited by: Fleery

Fleery wrote:
Does anyone know if you can use your airport extreme with an external HD attached and time machine in the same way as time capsule for wireless backups!???
No. Time Machine is supported in 3 configurations:
1. a directly attached HD
2. Time Capsule
3. A HD connected to a Mac with OS X 1.5 Server
I tried both 1 & 3 and they work perfectly.
The guy in the Apple store I spoke to says you should be able to if you mount the HD (a little cumbersome); I used to be able to mount the HD in Tiger, but cant in Leopard!!
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Restoring OSX SERVER from Time Machine

In the past we had been using a custom rsync script to run our backup rotation (3 drives, at least one off-site every night). Now that we have Leopard server, I've shifted over to using time machine (same 3 drive rotation, but backups happen at a system level, so it "feels" more stable to me (maybe I'm naivé?).
I set up the server, and then due to a little bit of poor planning on my part had to replace the system hard drive, so I basically had to rebuild the server from scratch. I know with Leopard client when you start up you can "restore from time machine", is that possible with Leopard server? It would have saved me a couple of hours. If not I imagine my disaster recovery plan (in case of building fire, etc.) would be:
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Paul,
Thanks for the feedback. Do any of those software packages you mention do incremental backups? Our current rsync solution, and Time machine both do, which is very useful since our data is about 300 gigs and we can have a month's worth of backups on a one gig drive.
I've looked at CCC and the only solution I can find is a complete backup, which basically means:
a) more than overnight to run a complete backup, just because of the vast number of files being transfered
b) can only fit 3 backups (at most) on our 1gig drive
Also, can you be a little more specific about what you mean by "gets whacked". Does that mean "Can't use pretty Time Machine interface" or "can't possibly get to your data".
Thx,

Leopard, Leopard server, and time machine.

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