Time machine backup on network drive

i have a netgear router with readyshare usb network drive i have a 2TB external hdd that i use for a central location to view files for both my imac 10.7.5 and multiple pc's windows 7 i currently have a external hdd connected to my imac just for time machine however this is only 320gb not large enough. was wondering if i could somehow make an alias of my current time machine bacup and place it in my network drive so that my backup would use this space too or  maybe even make this time machine drive larger? or if i delete the connected time machine drive will the alias still be as is? i understand that i can just create a partition however if i understand the process correctly this would erase my files and the only option would be ExFat format from imac for windows then i would make and extended journal for use with time machine. i am not sure i want to do this because i dont know if i could reformat the disk with the default software still on thie 2TB drive. also i dont know if i could use it with all my pc's and imac. currently i can transfer files to either computer.

I have the exact same problem, but I am not using TM over a network... Only my local Mac Pro w/ a 600gb external drive. I recall back when I first got Leopard that time machine did in fact ask me if I wanted it to delete old backups after the drive filled up. Then one day it randomly decided to not delete old backups anymore... Instead displaying the same error message you get.
Can anyone help? (Besides telling me not to back up certain files, and to do it less often. Those are BS solutions! I want my entire HD backed up every time automatically erasing old backups when necessary. Is that too much to ask for?)

Similar Messages

  • Time Machine backups to networked drive - TOO slow?

    Hi all,
    Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of hits when searching for these keywords (I don't have time to read them all), I will post my question here hoping that someone has mercy on my soul... :-)
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    Julian

    The initial estimate of time remaining can be wildly inaccurate.

  • Time machine restore from network drive kernel panic

    I had a late 2013 macbook pro 15" retina, I was backing up with time machine to a network drive (western digital my cloud). All of my backups are there and the data looks valid. In April I ended up selling the macbook pro, then recently I bought another one and attempted to restore from the network drive.
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    Well,
    PLEASE can you tell us how you figured out how to backup to a network drive because Apple tech told me you could not do that!
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    I'm interested in this topic so please feel free to share what you know and your experience with it. Thanks in advance.
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  • My time machine backup external hard drive has failed.  I have a newer external drive already connected to my MAC but can't figure out how to get Time Machine to set up on it?

    My time machine backup external hard drive has failed.  I have a newer external drive already connected to my MAC but can't figure out how to get Time Machine to set up on it

    http://pondini.org/TM/21.html

  • Can i transfer my time machine backup to another drive?

    can i transfer my time machine backup to another drive?

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    2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
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    New drives usually are pre-formatted for Windows, not Macs. WD is generally well known for their poor level of Mac support.

  • Restoring Time Machine backup to a drive in a "Voyager Dock"

    Restoring Time Machine backup to a drive in a "Voyager Dock"
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    I have my Time Machine back up for this computer in a Voyager Docking station.
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    So, You're saying I can do this from a different computer with its own Time Machine?
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  • Make Time Machine backup to specific drive only on specific network?

    I have an old macbook pro 2007 that I use for time machine backups over the local network. It works perfectly; however, my main computer is also a macbook pro (2013) I can only get backups to the MBP 2007 via a specified IP Address (10.0.1.232). The problem is, they're are 4 different networks I regularly connect to, and if I am on the wrong network, the backup will still be attempted. Sometimes, I get an authentication error, sometimes I get a disk not found error, and sometimes it successfully backs up, which I do not want unless I am on the correct network.
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    Benny B wrote:
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    Oh, and please update your profile ... 10.4.10?

  • Time Machine Backup to network shared drive.

    Hi All,
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    Copy stage failed with error:11
    Backup failed with error: 11
    Starting standard backup
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    Backing up to: /Volumes/500GB-Time Miachine/Backups.backupdb
    Error parsing SystemMigration.log to determine source volume of system migration.
    No pre-backup thinning needed: 42.93 GB requested (including padding), 399.92 GB available
    Stopping backup.
    Error: (-41) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/ericmontgomery/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Album Artwork/Download/677910B9A6CE02EF/00/12/11/677910B9A6CE02EF-8FE79D8543C93BC0.it c2 to /Volumes/500GB-Time Miachine/Backups.backupdb/EricsMBA/2011-02-05-081809.inProgress/48A5220A-4A96-4 8A2-A847-39C28D38F253/Macbook Air/Users/ericmontgomery/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Album Artwork/Download/677910B9A6CE02EF/00/12/11
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    Mounted network destination using URL: smb://Liz@liz-desktoppc/EricsBackup
    QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
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    Error parsing SystemMigration.log to determine source volume of system migration.
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    Copy stage failed with error:11
    Backup failed with error: 11
    Ejected Time Machine disk image.
    Ejected Time Machine network volume.
    Message was edited by: EricMontgomery

  • I want to use time machine on a network drive

    i know in the past Apple holds us hostage to buy their time capsule.  With Lion now launched, is there a work around to allow families to buy there own hard drive and use it for multiple macs for time machine?
    Im fairly new to Mac, convinced my wife to switch, now here we are held captive to buy a TC when we already have a fantastic 2TB drive we purchased for a fraction of the price of a TC.  I dont care about wifi, I just want to save our Mini time machine to our MBP networked drive (or vice versa).
    I currently have Lion on the MBP, and Leopard on the Mini.  After installing and hating Lion on my MBP, i have not "upgraded" the mini.  (although I am currently following the "upgrade back to Leopard" threads)
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    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.
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    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.

  • Time Machine backup and main drive corrupted. Help! (REWARD OFFERED)

    Here's the deal:
    I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini both runnign Snow Leopard. I use the Mac Mini as a kind of media center / server, it has a few external drives connected to it. On of these drives (1GB) is dedicated to Time Machine, the Mac Mini (80 GB hard drive) backs up to it directly and the Macbook Pro (500 GB hard drive) does it over the network (Time Machine created a sparsebundle). This has worked well for years now. Occasionally I got the error that Time Machine needed to start a new backup because the old one was corrupt. That happened about 2-3 times a year (did the same thing when I backued up via USB). Now about 2 weeks ago, that error came up and I just let the Macbook Pro on overnight and connected the ethernet cable for faster transfer.
    When I woke up, the Macbook Pro didn't respont at all, spinning beachball, no response at all beside mouse movement. I let it do it's thing for another 10 hours (while I was at work) and just held down the power button to power off and restart it. But all I got was the gray-on-gray flashing folder with the question mark in it, that's what you get when the Mac can't find bootable partitions. So I popped in the OSX Snow Leopard install disk, ran disk utility. It saw the hard drive, but no partition (i.e. Machintosh HD) on it. I checked the Time Machine backup and the sparsebundle was 300 GB (the Macbook Pro had 400 GB used, the remaining 100 GB were free). There is no way to restore from an unfinished Time Machine backup...
    First thing I did was clone the internal (Macbook Pro) hard drive to a DMG disk image using DiskDrill (the only program I found that could recognize the drive at all, not even DiskWarrior could). I also bought the exact same hard drive model and partitioned it like the cloned the corrupted hard drive to the new one using ddrescue (a command line tool that doesn't quit upon i/o errors but proceeds and tries to recover as much as it can). It copied everything except 65 kilobytes, the corrupted drive seemed to be physically damaged in a bunch of sectors relatively at the beginning of the disk. Since I had now an exact copy on a fresh, healthy drive, I went crazy trying out Disk Warrior (didn't recognize the drive at all), data rescue, testdisc, p a Windows isk, etc. Only R-Studio (on windows) showed the EFI and Macintosh HD partitions on there, they started and ended on the same sectors on the corrupted drive and its clone. After some research, I figured that the partition table was corrupt so I reformated the clone disk using the OSX Snow Leopard install disk (1 HFS Journaled Partition with GUID Partition table). R-Studio showed the EFI and Macintosh HD on that reformated drive, again, same sectors as before. So I figured I could just copy just the bytes where the Macintosh HD starts from the corrupted drive to the clone (using ddrescue). That worked, after almost 24 hours, I had the clone drive with a "disk1" partition on it that even disk utility could see.
    Now I was able to run Disk Warrior on it, but all it could do was recover a few Application folders (Resource-Folders and lproj-stuff), about 100 MB in total. It couldn't repair more of catalog file apparently. Luckily, Time Machine backed up quite a bit (300 GB out of 400 GB of data) and I was able to manually copy all the Dokuments, Desktop, user Library, Applications, Music, Download and Movies. Unfortunatley, only a little bit of the Pictures folder was copied. iPhoto library (80 to 100 GB) was nowhere to be found, backup must have failed right then. I can salvage the drives (time machine drive, original hard drive with a few broken sectors, DMG-image of that drive, 1-1 copy of that drive with partition table repaired) but that only gives me files with numeric names and today's date on teh JPEGs (instead of the date the picture was taken).
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    - Time Machine had to start a new backup. There's plenty of free space on that drive so there's a good chance there's old data left on it. Is there a way to restore files (including file names) and fodlers from deleted time machine backups?
    - Is there any way to re-build that catalog file from what is there left on the original hard drive? I can't imagine 65 kilobytes destroys it all.
    - Are there other ways to recover my iPhoto Library? The raw JPEG (and AVI) files with correct file names or metadata would suffice.
    Thanks in advance for any help, I'll actually reward the person with a working solution, 5 years of photo memories are somewhat important. It really ***** that a failure during a backup destroys that...

    Final Update:
    The catalog file on the original hard drive could not be fixed. Seems like Mac OSX tried to repair the catalog file while the sectors this file resides on failed. To make things worse the partition table was also broken beyond repair, even overwriting the sectors with a new correct partition table didn't help. DiskWarrior found less then 100 MB worth of stuff, mainly Applications folders.
    I recovered pretty much everything from the incomplete Time Machine backup by right-clicking the sparsebundle and browsing through the folders with the long alphanumeric names, looking for the version of the folder with the most files in there. All I was missing was part of the ~/Pictures folder, i.e. photobooth pictures and the whole iPhoto Library. My best option was to recover these files using data recovery tools.
    DiskDrill proved to be the absolute best, fast, responsive, efficient, and the only one able to mount the DMG-file with no valid file system on it. As there were many i/o errors and broken sectors on the original hard drive, I made a copy of it using a free command line tool called ddrescue (the standard dd tool just aborted when it encountered the i/o error). ddrescue copied the whole drive to a DMG image, I had 56 kilobytes with errors on the first pass, but it managed to shrink that down to just 4 kilobytes (wow!) after the second pass where it tries to re-read the broken secors. It took about 24 hours for a 512 GB 2.5" drive (5400 rpm) but well worth it. Be advised that ddrescue is really persistent and tries everything to recover those last errorneous bytes. At the very end of the process, the read/write head of the hard drive just goes wild trying to catch the data on the sectors with different momentum. This works but I assume this is pretty damaging for the original drive. I also copied it all to a new hard drive (again using ddrescue) and tried partition and catalog repair tools on that (DiskWarrion, testdiks, pdisk, etc.). Still no hint of a good result.
    I made a deep scan on the clone hard drive with DiskDrill. At the end (after about 8 hours over USB) it found 13 partition (I assume that's the Macintosh HD, EFI and some DMG files lying around) and  hundreds of thousands of pictures. I restored some JPG files just to check the quality, some were damaged, some were good with all the EXIF data intact. I just made it copy all JPG files into a folder. I know the pictures taken from my camera produce JPGs larger than 1 MB and smaller than 5 MB, so I sorted them by size and moved the smaller and larger files into seperate folders. I took the remaining folder (100 GB) and just dragged it into iPhoto. It imported them overnight. Auto-Split by events and I got my library back, alas with different file names, originals and edited versions side by side, lots of duplicates, some damaged, some not. But hey, all the pictures in chronological order. Okay there was also one large event with all the JPGs without valid EXIF data landed inside, iPhoto just takes the file creation date (i.e. the date where the recovered file was copied). As far as I can tell, these are all just data corpses, halfway overwritten copies, random pictures from the internet, desktop pictures, etc.
    I started to work my way back through the events, deleting the duplicates and renaming the events. There's an app called "Duplicate Annihilator" which apparently can find duplicate pictures in iPhoto and mark them for you. The free version only does 500 pictures but if it works, I'll get the full version. It can mark th eduplicate photos by adding something to the picture comment in iPhoto so you can manually review it all. Good stuff!

  • Can Time Machine backup a USB drive connected to Airport Extreme?

    Hi all,
    I have an airport extreme that I used to run a shared USB drive for the family. I have a network drive attached to the airport extreme which I used for Time Machine backups, how do I tell Time Machine to back up the USB drive also?
    All help very gratefully recieved.

    Thanks for your reply,
    When I open Time Machine preferences I can either select a different disk to use as the backup disk or exclude items from the back up. I cannot find an option to add the USB drive attached to my airport extreme. Apologies if I am being a little dumb.

  • Using Time Machine with a network Drive

    I recently bought a WD My Book Live network drive to use as my Time Machine backup. I was previously using a USB external HD for Time Machine with no problems. I have set up the new network drive but when I go in to Time Machine to select it as the drive to back up to, it is not showing up. The only drive I see is my old USB external HD. I have the latest firmware for the network drive and I am running Mac OSX10.5.8. Any suggestions?

    If you bought the WD in a USB enclosure it probably came formatted with NTFS (Windows). Time Machine can't use NTFS drives or SMB (Windows) network shares as a backup destination because that format does not allow the proper permissions to be set. If this is the case with your drive, open Disk Utility and reformat your new drive (NOT you system drive!!) with HFS+ aka 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)' and then the drive should show up as a target selection in Time Machine.

  • Time Machine backup causes network connections to fail

    We have a simple network with OS X Server (10.6.4) + a 10.6.4 Mac client and a Windows XP client. For some time we have been suffering sporadic drop outs of the network connection from the iMac OS X client to the server: the shared drives just disappear and you can't reconnect.
    I have now narrowed this down to a problem with Time Machine. By logging on as a user on the OS X Server I was able to observe that the user session on the server suffered the same problem sometimes and this ONLY happens when Time Machine is running - I think its always when Time Machine is backing up the server.
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    Message was edited by: davidav

    Yep, Rikakiah, seems you are right, I am not alone! There are two other threads here which discuss the same issue:
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11539266&#11539266
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11539227
    From my testing it seems that the problem may be related to some interplay between Time Machine and LDAP - I say this because I can sometimes clear the problem and regain access to my shares by going into Workgroup Manager, removing the group assignments (which give access to the shares), saving the change, then adding the group assignments back.
    This made me think that your solution should fix it, but unfortunately although I have excluded /var/db from Time Machine backups, I am still sporadically getting the problem.
    Message was edited by: davidav
    Message was edited by: davidav

  • Time Machine restore from Network Drive

    Hi,
    I have a Time Machine backup of my Mountain Lion system on a GoGlex Home wireless network drive. Location is as follows:
    /Volumes/GoFlex Home Backup/TimeMachineBackup/AlexHarris.sparsebundle
    My problem is, when I try and restore this sparsebundle by either using the recovery menu or migration assistant, the only thing that shows up is Go Flex Home and neither of these can find the sparsebundle.
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    Any ideas? I want to restore my entire system and not just go in and drag and drop documents etc.
    Thanks in advance.

    This worked fine.

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