Problems using TimeMachine from two Macs to IOMega Home Media Drive

Question

Hi,
This has been driving me crazy for a couple of weeks now, so I'm hoping that someone here can point me in the right direction.
I have a PPC G5 and my wife uses an iMac. I recently bought an IOMega Home Media Drive and wanted to use it with TimeMachine. I set up the G5 and got that working, but when I tried to add my wife's iMac I've had nothing but problems.
I tried resetting the IOMega back to factory defaults, deleting and then re-creating the backups folder, using usernames and passwords or a guest account, and nothing seems to work. I occasionally do something that breaks it on the G5 (running 10.5.8) but I have been able, for the most part, to get it working again, but it's never worked from my wife's iMac (running 10.6.2).
I even tried creating the sparsebundles by hand and copying them in which seemed to work on the G5 but not on the iMac. I thought that the problem might be trying to back up two systems to the same share, but I'm not sure how to split them. Is there a way to create separate backup shares on the IOMega (which seems to connect using AFP even though I've seen references to SMB in some of the forums) so that each system would use its own? Is there a general problem when trying to back up two Macs to the same network share?
The error that I tend to get is that the "backup volume is read only". On the iMac the current error I'm getting, after creating the hostname.sparsebundle image (oddly enough when TimeMachine tried creating it yesterday it dropped the MAC address...not sure why), is: "/Volumes/backups-1/hostname.sparsebundle could not be created (error 45)."
Any help would be greatly appreciated, this has been very frustrating.
Thanks,
Rob

Answer 1

Hi,
You don't want to hear this, but Time Machine does not back up to network drives, except Time Capsules or a shared drive on another Mac running Leopard or Snow Leopard on the same local network. It will often back-up to a USB drive connected to an Airport Extreme, but even that is, technically, unsupported, and may require running a special Terminal command to make it work.
Here's the official word: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1733
You may find some hardware or "hacks" that might make it work, in some cases, to a degree. But use them at your own risk.
First, since this is *unsupported by Apple,* there's nowhere to go when there's trouble.
Second, you're risking a future update preventing it from working, and perhaps rendering your backups useless.
No guarantees, of course, but this might help: https://iomega-na-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/iomegana_en.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=22012&p_created=1246919828&p_sid=KBbtj nNj&p_accessibility=&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PWRmbHQmcF9 ncmlkc29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTEwLDEwJnBfcHJvZHM9MTAzMSwxMDQzJnBfY2F0cz0mcF9wdj0yLjE wNDMmcF9jdj0mcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1hbnN3ZXJzLnNlYXJjaF9ubCZwX3BhZ2U9MSZwX3NlYXJjaF9 0ZXh0PXRpbWUgbWFjaGluZQ**&p_li=&ptopview=1