Time Machine Can Be Made to work with a Network Share

Question

FYI I am just posting this here for the benefit of the community. The source of this info is: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=375047
As I write this, I am doing a Time Machine backup to a ReadyNAS NV+ afp mounted share. Here is a summary of what the thread above says you need to do. It worked for me.
Take any supported USB standalone drive and plug it in to an available USB port.
Use Disk Utility to format the drive (or partition on the drive) and name that partition to whatever you want your network share to be called. In my case, I called it "office-tm".
After you do this, open the Time Machine preference panel and select that new drive (in my case "office-tm") to be the Time Machine backup drive.
After Time Machine sets up the drive, it will start counting down before the next backup. Press the little X on the right side to cancel the backup.
Now open a terminal session and change directories to /Volumes/<drive> where in my case <drive> was office-tm (cd /Volumes/office-tm).
When you do a ls -a -l, you will see two important files. One starts with a period (.) and contains numbers after it. The other one is called .com.apple.timemachine.supported.
What you need to do is copy these two files to your network share. The trick is that you want your network share to have the same name as this drive you just prepared (again, in my case it was called office-tm). I first created a new share on my ReadyNAS+ called office-tm and set the quotas properly.
Then you need to copy the files. There are several ways to do this but the way I did it was that I temporarily mounted the network share at a different mount point in terminal just to get the files over. So for example, I did:
sudo mount -t afp afp://<ip.addr.of.share>/office-tm /Volumes/office-tm2
Then I copied the two files over (substitute your appropriate volume names):
cp /Volumes/office-tm/.00whateveryourfilenameis /Volumes/office-tm2/.
cp /Volumes/office-tm/.com.apple.timemachine.supported /Volumes/office-tm2/.
Turn off Time Machine so you can unmount.
Now you can unmount both the USB drive and the network share and then you remount the network share as the proper name. The same one that the USB drive was named so as far as Time Machine is concerned, the volume is still there. The two files are on the network share so all is fine and Time Machine can find the volume it expects.
Wait for Time Machine to start it's hourly backup and away you go.
PLEASE NOTE THIS DISCLAIMER - There is probably a good reason why Apple disabled this feature so you might want to think carefully before you rely on this hack published in the MacRumors forum to back up your Mac. I am using this for testing purposes only and I am still using traditional backup techniques for my "real" backup of my office machine. If you don't get good Time Machine backups and you have relied upon them for critical data, don't blame anyone but yourself.

Answer 1

Name: RAIDiator
Version: 3.01c1-p6
Date: Tue Dec 12 17:46:22 2006
Size: 46566912 bytes
Reason: Final 6.
We should probably start a new topic in networking on this. I am seeing some strangeness with afp shares as well.
I have most shares set up to allow access by both CIFS/SMB and AFP. If I use Sidebar and try to access the shares by AFP, it says it can't connect to the server. But the same shares via CIFS works fine. (I can click on the "Windows" server icon and connect.) But for any of these shares, I can manually connect with the normal Go > Connect to Server... method, specifying afp://<ip address> and that works fine.
In the case of the Time Machine share that is the subject of this post, I disabled CIFS and am only using AFP because I wanted to make sure I connected to the share only via AFP for Time Machine purposes.
BTW, I do not use USER or DOMAIN security mode in my case and my shares are set up as SHARE security mode.