Setting Up Time Machine over a Network

Time Machine Back up Problem
This gets a little complicated, but here goes.
Mac A with Drive A
Mac B with Drive B
Both running Maverick and networked using AFP & SMB
Having set up Time Machine on Mac A
Mac A would back up to Drive A and Drive B
We then tried to set up Mac B:-
Mac B would back up to Drive B does not see Drive A
Having tried several ways of trying to get it to work and different settings, without knowing what we have done, (if anything) now…
Mac A backs up to Drive A but does not see Drive B
Mac B backs up to Drive B and Drive A
Help!?

Check around the forum, you are one of very very many. It doesn't matter what WD say, do you see a Certified by Apple notice on it?
Go here, most authoritative site about Time Machine you can find. http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html
Specific info on Network Drives are here http://pondini.org/TM/2.html
Post back here and ask for Pondini if you need more.
You can also read some tales of woe here

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Time Machine over the Network: Terribly Slow

Hello,
I've been using Time Machine for over 3 years now with no issues over the network; the destination being a 2TB external Seagate connected to another iMac connected through gigabit ethernet. Everything has been working flawlessly: Every hour Time Machine would MOUNT the sparseimage it created on the disk, BACKUP the data and UNMOUNT the disk image when finished.
Until I upgraded to Lion. The above process is still working per se, however it is PAINFULLY slow! A 50MB backup can take up to AN HOUR! Searching around on the net, advised that there could be an issue with Spotlight as well, however this is not the case for me, since Spotlight finished a new index in under 30 mins. Followed every tutorial I could find on the issue, to no avail..
I then upgraded to Mountain Lion with the hope that the issue will clear itself. Cleared my old backups, resetted Time Machine by erasing its .plist file, restarted my iMac just to make sure and connected Time Machine to the network share anew, creating a "sharing only" account on the host iMac, i.e. the one that has the external HD connected through USB. Still no luck.
I painfully realize that I still have the same issue. While backing up, network traffic is under 100KB, and activity monitor does not show any backupd or mds or any similar processes taking anything over 3% of CPU time.
What could be wrong?

Hello again,
Tries on the other iMac (also running 10.8.2) and things are exactly the same: Image creation takes almost half an hour, and copying crawls at under 1MB/min. While time machine image is mounted and Time Machine is "backing up", accessing ANY disk on the host Mac is VERY slow. Seems like something hogs up appleshare when Time Machine is in use. Mind you, there is insignificant network traffic as seen by Activity Monitor, as well as insignificant CPU usage while backing up.
Stopping backup and using tmutil to set the Time Machine destination to the mounted image as mounted by Finder, solves the issue again, revving up Time Machine throughput to over 20MB/sec! There is also no issues acessing the other Mac as well, under this scenario.
Up to this point, the only way I have managed to use Time Machine over a networked external HD is through the NAS server. Both configurations where I am using a Mac running 10.8.2 as a server of the external disk have failed with very low throughput while backing up. Something must be wrong in 10.8.2's afp when Time Machine is mounting the image by itself.
I may need to remind you that I have been successfully backing up to the external HD for 4 years now; something broke a few months after the client iMac was upgraded to Lion and at the time when the host iMac was upgraded to Mountain Lion. Will try to locate a Mac running some later OS X version to do some more testing.
Also reminding that I have used two distinctive iMacs and two external HD drives for my tests so far. The client iMac has remained the same, however 10.8.2 has been reinstalled on it a couple of times. Have also used an afp-enabled NAS server which worked fine with Time Machine.

Time machine over a network volume

So since Snow Leopard (and I think Leopard), when you use Time machine to back up over a network share (for example, a USB drive attached to a mini server), the OSX creates a sparsebundle image where all time machine files are stored.
In Lion, If I encrypt my hard drive, and I keep on backing up using time machine over this network share.. will the sparsebundle image be encrypted or not?

I don't see much difference between using a sparsebundle image or an encrypted sparsebundle image.
I've sent this feedback to Apple see if they enable this in subsequent updates.

Time Machine over the Network

Hello,
I've been using Time Machine for over 3 years now with no issues over the network; the destination being a 1TB-limited sparseimage setup as instructed by this tutorial. The image resides on an external HD connected on a network-connected iMac. Everything has been working flawlessly: Every hour Time Machine would MOUNT the disk image on its own, BACKUP the data and UNMOUNT the disk image as well.
Until I upgraded to Lion. The above process is still working per se, however it is PAINFULLY slow! A 50MB backup can take up to AN HOUR! Searching around on the net, advised that there could be an issue with Spotlight as well, however this is not the case for me, since Spotlight finished a new index in under 30 mins.
While testing, I tried to copy a 200MB file ONTO the Time Machine disk (mounted from the sparseimage automatically by Time Machine) and it took OVER 3 hours! I then stopped Time Machine (which tool half an hour) and mounted the image via Finder and the same file copied in 4 secs!
I really don't get it; I bet both times the mounted Volume runes under the same protocol, AFP via TCP, why is it behaving so strangely when auto-mounted by Time Machine?
Next, I read about tmutil has been added to Lion upwards and that setting a mounted disk image as destination is now supported by TM. So I went on and mounted the image via the Finder, set the mounted Volume as the time machine destination via tmutil and gave the backup a try. The process went away really fast, was extremely pleased!
However: As soon as the backup finishes, the Volume EJECTS and TM reports that the next backup is to be made "when the backup disk is connected"! It will NOT mount the image by its own, neither to backup or to access old backups. But wait, there's more: Be selecting "Backup now" via the TM menu item, the Volume MOUNTS INSTANTLY and the backup takes place, with no issues whatsoever!
What I need is a TM that backs up quickly over the network and mounts its disk automatically.
Well, I guess if you had the time and will to read the above text, you may try to help, if you have a clue, that is...
Thank you.

I am afraid that the information on the excellent tutorial (which I have already checked many times) don't help me much... I have two main questions:
1. Why is the TM-mounted volume so slow? Mounting the same volume through the Finder works blazing fast! Is there something special in the way TM mounts its volumes?
2. Is there a proper way to force TM to start an automatic backup, when the backup volume is not mounted? It used to work when the destination was the network volume, but does not work when the destination is set to the sparsebundle volume which inside the network volume.

Problems setting up Time Machine using a network drive

I am having problems setting up TimeMachine on my Mac Mini to work with a WD MyBookLive network drive. The network drive came with a TimeMachineBackup shared folder preconfigured. When I first connected the drive to the router and turned on TimeMachine, the TimeMachineBackups appeared as an option when I did "Select Backup Disk" from TimeMachine Preferences.
I managed to successfully connect to the drive and start a backup running. However the backup hit a problem and I started getting an error that the "disk was already in use". I therefore tried to remove the disk to try and start again. Hoever when I now do go into "Select Backup Disk" from TimeMachine Preferences the shared folder on the drive no longer apperas and I only get the option to serach for an Time Capsule.
If I go into Finder, the MyBookLive shows up as a connected Device with all its shared folders showing (including the TimeMachineBackup folder) and my Mac is definitely connected to the drive. How do I get the Drive & TimeCapsuleBackup shared folder to reappear in TimeMachine Preferences so that I can select it as the destination for my backups?

Check around the forum, you are one of very very many. It doesn't matter what WD say, do you see a Certified by Apple notice on it?
Go here, most authoritative site about Time Machine you can find. http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html
Specific info on Network Drives are here http://pondini.org/TM/2.html
Post back here and ask for Pondini if you need more.
You can also read some tales of woe here

Making a new external drive available for Time Machine over wireless network

I connected a new Seagate 2T external drive to my iMac to increase backup capacity using Time Machine. I have a 1T Time Capsule. I am backing up to the Time Capsule wirelessly to another Mac in the house.
The Time Capsule is full.
How do I make the new Seagate available to be used for wireless backup? It does not show on the other Mac as being available in Time Machine?

See #22 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

Time Machine over a network

I've been researching this issue for a couple of weeks now and every time I think I get close, I hit a speed bump.
I have a direct connected Lacie 1 TB drive that I'm using for my iMac which has worked fine for 3.5 years. It's now 90% full, and with a recent addition of a MBP I now have the need to back up two Macs.
I've looked at using a USB port on a newly acquired router (Asus N66u) and I'm told that model doesn't support TM. Then, it was suggested that I look at a NAS solution like Synology and in a forum there it was stated that any network backup is a bad idea. I'm not sure where the truth lies, so I'm looking for some good feedback on some viable solutions.
Thanks in advance to whomever responds.

Compiments of Pondini
http://pondini.org/TM/Time_Capsule.html

Time machine on a network drive

The situation:
We have a Mac Pro with a Time Machine volume on an external drive that is attached to a networked Mac. I don't think this is a very common scenario, but it works just fine over a gigabit network. We do not automount any drives on the networked machine but mount (or connect to) this remote machine manually whenever the Mac Pro in question is restarted (which is not often).
The question:
Due to some renovation, we'd like to temporarily connect this external drive to the Mac Pro and mount the Time Machine Volume. Will Time Machine find the correct sparse bundle on the external drive, recognize it as an existing Time Machine backup and update that as long as needed. In other words, the external drive will have a different unix path name, but the sparse bundle will have the correct name. And when the renovation is done, we will resume running Time Machine over the network, and I hope that Time Machine will again do the right thing.
I want to avoid having Time Machine's creating a new backup when the unix path changes.
Thanks.

In the past Apple was not holding you hostage by requiring you to use a Time Capsule for network Time Machine backups. Search on Google for Time machine NAS OS X (or something like that) You will find a number of drives that were working with SL.
Now, they did change the file protocol in Lion, so some of the NAS servers won't work with Lion, at the moment. So long as it is a decent company that makes the NAS they should be releasing a firmware update to get their NAS working with Lion.
One of the companies that put out a press release was Western Digital. They said they would be working on an updated firmware so that you could use it as a Time Machine drive.
Just look around the interwebs and I am sure you will find several that will work.

How do I set up Time Machine to work with an Iomega network hard drive?

I have just bought a new iMac having switched from Windows, and am very much a beginner when it comes to all things Apple. Previously I had used my NAS hard drive with my old windows pc. i successfully used it to transfer a lot of data from the old pc to the iMac but can't seem to get it recognised when I try to configure time machine. I have downloaded the latest version of Iomega Home storage manager which appears in the application folder in the dock, but when I click on The HSM icon it just disappears and nothing happens. I can access the drive through the Bonjour service and can see its contents in Finder. I have looked through the forums here but much of the info assumes a level of knowledge that i don't have. Is there an 'idiot's guide' anywhere to enable me to set up time machine to use the network hard drive?

You would probably benefit from a couple of things, first going through these 2 links
Time Machine FAQs & Time Machine Troubleshooting.
If you still have questions there is a TM forum, because TM is part of OS X you will find the forum in the Snow Leopard forum. Click Apple Support Communities and in the search field type Snow Leopard. Once you are in the correct forum you can narrow your search by clicking Refine this list.
Roger

My mac book air connects to my network and gets internet access but time machine cannot find my airport base station to set up time machine

My mac book air connects to my network and gets internet access but airport utility cannot find my airport base station to set up time machine

airport utility cannot find my airport base station to set up time machine
Normally, AirPort Utility is not used or needed to set up Time Machine backups......unless a default setting on the Time Capsule to Enable File Sharing has been changed.
On the other hand, if you open AirPort Utility, a picture of the Time Capsule should be displayed. Are you saying here that the Time Capsule does not appear when you open AirPort Utility?

How do I set up Time Machine to backup to an external hard drive on my wireless router?

I have just set up an external hard drive to my wireless router and am now wanting to set up Time Machine to back up to the hard drive. I can see the hard drive in Finder and can even send files to it manually. I just don't see in setting up Time Machine any option to backup to that hard drive. Is it even possible?

Well, I figured out a way around it that works for me but may not be suitable for everyone. Instead of connecting the external hard drive to the router I tried connecting it directly to my computer. I then right-clicked the hard drive's folder on my desktop, clicked "Get Info" and checked the box that says "Shared Folder". I then went to the bottom of that window and under "Sharing & Permissions" and next to "Everyone" checked that they could all "Read and Write".
The hard drive is now shared over my network, so when I got on one of my other Mac's that I was wanting to set up Time Machine with, the Time Machine Application had no problem finding the hard drive and backing up to it.
I have all computer's setup for file sharing too, so that may need to be checked as well.
This was a simple enough fix but the reason I said that it may not be suitable for everyone is that the other computer's backing up to this hard drive via Time Machine is now reliant on my computer being turned on. I'm okay with that though.

Time Machine over AirPort to Time Capsule... maybe a solution

Like a lot of people on this forum, apparently, I have been suffering from the inability to make reliable Time Machine backups to a Time Capsule over AirPort. Here's what I did to solve the situation.
Here's my network setup:
I have an ADSL wireless box with b/g network connected over ethernet to a 1-TB Time Capsule which has a 5 GHz 'n' network. Using 5 GHz 'n' network where I am means no interference. All equipment that is not capable of 'n' is on the wireless box, 'n' equipment (basically, only my MacBook Pro) gets on the Time Capsule. It doesn't make internet faster, but sure makes the Time Capsule accessible. Both networks are hidden and secured with WEP (b/g) or WPA2 (n).
(the Time Capsule is double-NATted, unfortunately, to cut down on network chatter in the system log)
After upgrading to 10.5.6, I think I haven't been able to make a reliable Time Machine backup over AirPort. It may have been well before that (possibly with the AirPort Extreme update) but I don't remember. Most of the time, before the wireless box arrived, I have been making far-too-irregular backups over ethernet to the Time Capsule.
Anyway, I had been trying to get Time Machine to work over AirPort to the backup on the Time Capsule. I had made the original backup over ethernet (all 500 GB worth over a weekend). For the incremental backups, though, I would prefer AirPort because keeping a cable attached really is a pain. Of course, it didn't work right away.
What I couldn't figure out was why. Time Machine mounted the sparsebundle volume on the Time Capsule, but after that it seemed to do nothing with it. I left it for half a day and found little by way of relevant network activity. I tried the following to no avail:
* disabled Little Snitch (outgoing firewall) and the OS X firewall (incoming firewall)
* disabled security on the network
* disabled and re-enable Time Machine
* changed the name of the sparsebundle volume (that was dumb!)
* trash Time Machine preferences and re-select the backup disk
* reboot, reboot, reboot
Whatever I did, it sucked. Connecting over ethernet was excellent, and incremental backups went really quick, but AirPort just didn't fly. It would have been worse if it were slow; chances are then it'd be a hardware problem. But nothing was going over AirPort with Time Machine.
In amongst the surfing, I found somewhere how to downgrade the firmware on the Time Capsule. Worth a try since nothing was working. I opened up the AirPort Utility and checked, but it would only give me 7.3.2 (AirPort Utility 5.3.2). I searched and found the AirPort 5.3.1 software, and using Pacifist extracted the AirPort Utility application. That would let me 'downgrade' the Time Capsule firmware to 7.3.1 (and 7.3). It downloaded the 7.3.1 for me and put it on the Time Capsule without problems.
I then made a test run with Time Machine over ethernet, that was fine. The I tried over AirPort - and hey presto! it worked! I re-enabled my network setup (firewalls, security) and it's still working fine.
So, if your Time Capsule is on 7.3.2 firmware and Time Machine over AirPort *****, try downgrading to 7.3.1. The AirPort 5.3.1 software, which can download and install the 7.3.1 software (5.3.2 doesn't) can be found here:
http://support.apple.com/downloads/TimeCapsule_and_AirPort_Base_Station__802_11n__Firmware_7_31
Note: you need Pacifist to extract the AirPort Utility application;
do not install the software over your existing AirPort software

This may be tough because TM isn't supported over wi-fi unless you're using a Time Capsule. There are a couple of resources available to you and I'd also recommend posting in the Snow Leopard forum because TM is part of OS X the OS X forum would be the right venue. The first thing is I'm guessing you are using a router, if so make sure the firmware on it is up-to-date. You will need to refer to the router's manual. You also should do the same with the modem too. Some written resources are:
Time Machine FAQs
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Pondini Time Machine Tips
That's about all I can help you out with.
Good luck!

Time machine backup from network share

Hi there,
I was wondering whether there is a possibility to backup a personal folder on a network drive/share via time machine?
Anybody?
Pierre

This may help, in a backwards way. When I attempted to attach a Buffalo Technology NAS to my system and use it with Time Machine, I was unable to make it work. So I contacted Apple Technical Support on the phone and was elevated to talking to one of their Senior Engineers. He informed me that Apple designed Time Machine to only be compatible with USB and Firewire, and that Apple does NOT support use of Time Machine over an ethernet connection to an NAS. So he recommended I return my NAS and purchase a USB/Firewire type external drive for use with Time Machine. Which is what I did and have been happy ever since.
Hope this helps

Setting up Time Machine with Snow Leopard and MyBook World Edition II NAS

I have just successfully set up Time Machine on my MyBook World Edition II NAS. It's not so straightforward, and the information on the Western Digital support site is either unhelpful or flat-out wrong, so here's a post that will hopefully save people in a similar position a lot of time and frustration.
Here are the key facts:
1. The MyBook World Edition II NAS does support Time Machine -- if you upgrade to at least firmware Release 1.01.14 (9/29/09). See http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/updates/?family=mbworld. Amazingly, the Level I support people at Western Digital told me that Time Machine is not supported! I had to point him to this link.
2. MyBook World Edition II comes with a built-in user, WD_Backup, which appears to be the only user that can be used for the backup.
3. Follow the instructions here: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/updates/docs/en/appletimemachine.pdf. BUT, what the instructions don't tell you is the password for that user, which Mac OS will ask you for during the Time Machine setup. On my device, it was "admin" but other posts say the password can be "backup" or "wd_backup."
4. Ignore some of the misleading statements in the Western Digital "knowledge base." For example, it says Time Machine is not supported. That used to be true but with the firmware update, is no longer true. Also, some instructions direct you to make a partition on your drive for Time Machine using Disk Utility. This is not possible, as far as I can tell, because the MyBook World Edition II shows up as a "share," not a "device" in the system, and therefore Disk Utility does not see it.
5. The reason I wanted to set up a partition, where I could limit the disk space, is that I read that Time Machine creates daily backups, with incremental versions of documents. Thus, the Time Machine backup will eventually fill up whatever space is given to it. Since I could not partition the MyBook World Edition II, what I did instead was to enable the "Quota" functionality and then put a disk quota on the WD_Backup user. I hope this will do the trick. (I have the further issue of having two Time Machine backups, one for me, one for my wife. How our Time Machines will battle it out for the disk space, I have no idea.)
I hope that the Western Digital people will create greater flexibility for Time Machine users in future firmware updates.
Anyway, hope this helped.

You do need to know that Apple may not support this: Here's the official word: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1733 (Leopard) or http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html (Snow Leopard).
You may be able to get it to work successfully, but there's no guarantee it will work well, or in the future.
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.
That post obviously applies to Leopard; Snow Leopard appears to have added some requirements, that are also not supported by all NAS devices: some that were working with Leopard no longer work with Snow Leopard.
As long as you understand the risks, it's your call. But do yourself a favor and maintain some sort of secondary backup, such as a "clone" via CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, or some other backup app. (Many of us do that with any backup app: no app is perfect, and all hardware fails, sooner or later.)

Setting up Time Machine to use an external drive attached to another mac

I have an external drive connected to an iMac G5 (OS X 10.5.6) that is used by Time Machine on that mac. I would like to set up Time Machine on my MacBook Pro (also OS X 10.5.6) to back up to that same drive. File sharing is enabled on the iMac but I can't seen to mount just the iMac's the external drive. Rather, the MacBook Pro mounts the entire iMac file system --- it shows up as "brian.imac" under the 'shared' heading of the finder window; the iMac's individual volumes show up as folders. Time Machine doesn't seem to recognize these as allowable destinations. What am I doing wrong?

Brian Curtiss wrote:
When I click on "brian.imac" on the MacBook Pro it opens the iMac's file system in the finder window. The iMac's external drive appears as a folder in this window. Clicking on that folder opens the external drive in the finder (the icon along the top of the finder window even looks like a drive, not a folder), but the 'drive' doesn't appear on the desktop or along the left side of the finder window.
that's normal.
The iMac external drive is listed as an attached drive if I click on the "brian.macbook" under the "Devices" heading of the finder window (along with the built-in drive, mobile me drive and 'network,).
This should be enough. normally, at this point the drive should appear as a possible TM drive choice. I don't know why it doesn't work for you.
You can try the following terminal command. It should not be needed but maybe it will help
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
With the iMac's external drive's finder window (on the MacBook Pro) still open, clicking "Choose Backup Disk..." in the "Time Machine" system preferences window brings up an empty list. How do I get Time Machine to recognize the iMac's external drive as a valid choice?

Setting Up Time Machine over a Network

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