Time machine local to Network

I have three macs on a wireless network. all machines have a relatively large amount of data (over 120GB). i have a 2TB USB drive lying around that i wanted to use for time machine backups. what i want to do is to "seed" the backup of the other machines by attaching the USB drive to them, doing a local backup (very fast) and then setting time machine to point to the USB drive that will be shared by one of the machines all the time. is there a way to trick time machine to recognize the backup it already did on the USB drive if it is not attached locally? my testing has shown that time machine wants to do a full backup when i mount the drive over the network, but then again i don't have much experience with time machine and cannot find any settings other than backup location.

seb_mbp wrote:
I have three macs on a wireless network. all machines have a relatively large amount of data (over 120GB). i have a 2TB USB drive lying around that i wanted to use for time machine backups. what i want to do is to "seed" the backup of the other machines by attaching the USB drive to them, doing a local backup (very fast) and then setting time machine to point to the USB drive that will be shared by one of the machines all the time. is there a way to trick time machine to recognize the backup it already did on the USB drive if it is not attached locally?
No. Time Machine stores backups differently when done locally (in a Backups.backupdb folder at the top level of the volume) vs. over a network (a Backups.backupdb folder inside a rather odd container called a +sparse bundle).+ You can't switch from one to the other.
Your best bet is to partition the drive, so the Mac being backed-up locally has it's own, exclusive space. The other two can have their own partitions, or can share one. See #4 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
If possible, connect the source and destination Macs to the network via Ethernet cables for the first, full backup. It should be 2-3 times faster than WIFI.

Similar Messages

Time Machine works across network?

My work is considering making the jump to Leopard Server. I'm mostly interested in this page: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/filesharing.html
Is it true that Time Machine on Leopard Server will automatically backup all my connected users hard drives? With that in place, there's no need for each workstation to run Time Machine locally with a locally connected Time Machine HDD?
Or does Time Machine on Leopard Server work like normal Time Machine and only backups what on my server's local drives to another server drive?

While the server can be set to be the destination for client's needs for a Time Machine destination, so can any other Leopard client computer.
I would need to mention though that I've just opened Leopard Server and am immediately disappointed that Time Machine will not work in Advanced Configuration.
FTP requires Advanced Configuration and so I am stuck without one or the other.

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.
I chose the option to restore on boot from network device, it properly detects and lets me browse my previous backups. I choose restore, the restore will run for a few hours and then reboot with a kernel panic.
panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff00184c0ac1): "Unable to find driver for this platform: \"ACPI\".\n"0/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-2422.90.20/iokit/Kernel/IOPlatformExpert.cpp: 1541"
I've tried a few different backups, one from April, one from march...both result in the same error. Any ideas why this would happen?

Time Machine full system restores only work if the backup disk doesn't need drivers separate from Mac OS X to mount. To make a long story short, you CAN'T do a full system restore with the disk your backups are on.

Time Machine and a network drive combined

I figured out how to connect Time Machine with a network drive (like LaCie Mini). It works great, the only thing is, everytime I restart the mac I need to re-connect manually to the server in order TM can run.
I wondered why OS X gives not the option to connect to certain servers AUTOMATICALLY when starting up?
thanks for help

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!
To your question though, on those LaCie drives, you have to log in with a password, right? On the drives I have used with clients, although the password was filled in for me, we had to press OK every single time to actually connect to the drive... I could not bypass the login procedure on the drive, it had nothing to do with OSX. You might serve yourself well to see if LaCie can offer you a way to connect to the drive automatically?
Although I know nothing about scripts, could you just get a script to run automatically at startup to connect you to that drive?
I'm interested in this topic so please feel free to share what you know and your experience with it. Thanks in advance.
I was also frustrated to find out that I couldn't even back up via Time Machine to a drive connected via USB to my Airport Extreme... I mean come on!

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: 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 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.

Can you use time machine on a networked hard drive

Can you use time machine on a networked hard drive?

See if this helps: Using Time Machine with a networked hard drive

Time Machine Local Snapshot - perhaps not enabled?

I've read that there is confusion about the Time Machine Snapshot function, but I am still not convinced mine is working.
Have just purchased my MacBook Pro (& loving it) and am doing my Time Machine backups to a 3rd party external HD via firewire 800. When away from my desk I can not get into Time Machine at all and am presented with the message Your Time Machine backup can't be found and when I look at the Time Machine Setup under System Preferences there is nothing at all there to indicate that local backups are enabled.
As I thought the whole purpose of the local snapshot was that files could be retrieved while on the road, I feel something is not right with my setup. Advice appreciated thanks

Perhaps these Links may be of assistance...
Time Machine Local Snapshots Laptops
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878
Time Machine...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427

Time machine local snapshots are taking up significant amount of hard drive space.

Hi there, my hard drive had become close to full and I got a warning message so I started a clean up. I have moved my iTunes media folder and my iPhoto picture folder to my Time Capsule external hard drive as well as deleting unnecessary apps and files. I was able to free up quite a bit of space but in looking at the hard drive in "About this Mac" the backups section is taking up 120.53 GB of my 250 GB hard drive. In my internet research it appears the "backups" section represents the Time Machine local snapshots when the designated drive is not available. Is there a way to decrease the space that the snapshots are taking up? 120 GB of my hard drive seems a bit excessive. Any advice is welcome, thanks!

what is confusing is why I would get a warning message that the disc was becoming full if there is 128GB worth of files that should have been automatically deleted?
You didn't get the warning because of that. You got it because of the files that you moved to another volume, and perhaps others. The local snapshots contain some of those files. They're available, for the time being, in case you need to restore them. Eventually they'll be deleted.

After changing my wifi password I am having trouble finding my time machine on my network, any help please?

I have just changed my wifi password for added security but cannot find my time machine on my network. In the status bar it says that the time machine is not configured (although it has been) and every time I try to find it using airport utlity it remains hidden. Any help would be appreciated as I have a recent back up on there.

First off, thank you so much to everyone who is trying to help! I really appreciate it!
I opened the "backups.backupdb" folder as you suggested "jeffreyfromtas" and found 2 folders:
dvlynn's iMac and
dvlynn's iMac 2.
The 1st folder seems to contain all the backups from the 1st time it backed up in Sept. 2010 until the last time it backed up without error in January of this year.
The 2nd folder contains one file titled "2014-01-03-175020.inProgress"
I purchased this time machine backup drive in 2010 after the origional drive on my iMac crashed and was replaced. When that happened my system was updated to Snow Leopard where it is now. The only major changes I have made are that I moved a lot of large video files off my main drive onto external hard drives to make more room on the iMac.
Other than that everything has stayed the same.
I'm asking it what size the 2 folders are but it's taking forever to answer and I venture to guess it will be 99.99% in the 1st folder and 0.01% in the second folder.
Let me know if that makes any sense.
And thanks again!

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?)

Time machine stalling with network backup to Live Duo

I'm running Mountain Lion (10.8.2) and using a Western Digital Live Duo (NAS with 6TB set up with RAID1 (mirror)) for backup with Time Machine (TM). The WD Live Duo has a specific feature for supporting Time Machine and shares a partition for TM backup, but something is wacky as TM came up a few days ago saying that it had validated the backup and needed to create a new backup.
The NAS is available on the network, I can easily access it from multiple computers on our home network as well as from the iMac I'm trying to backup.
I'm connected to the NAS via a network switch (1000/100/10) that both the NAS and this iMac are connected to using Gigabit ethernet wired connections.
Time machine has been running for 2 days now and reports " 67.63GB of 363.44 GB - About 5 days" . Yesterday it said 4 days.. ;-)
I've been having issues with TM stalling and eating up all the resources when I was just backing up to a local USB drive.
Is there any other control for TM that is not visible? Where would I find the TM logs to see if something else is going on?
Any other ideas?
Thanks.

Backing up with Time Machine to a third-party network device is unsupported by Apple and unreliable. Most if not all such devices use the obsolete "netatalk" implementation of AFP, which doesn't meet the technical requirements for a Time Machine server. I strongly suggest you back up to two or more locally attached external hard drives. If you want network backup, use an Apple Time Capsule or another Mac with File Sharing active as the destination.

Time Machine for clients + Network Home folders?

I currently use Retrospect to back up my client machines, but frankly I don't like it that much. I'd really like to have Time Machine working for all of the client machines so that the users can easily grab copies of their own backups, rather than having to request them from me. I plan to continue to use Retrospect to back up the data on the server and to back up non-Leopard and non-OS X clients.
However, I'm also hoping to move some or all of my OS X clients to network home directories. I saw some mention in a forum that Time Machine doesn't work with network home directories, but I can't find anything about this in the server documentation. Is this true? Can't I have my network home directory clients back up their home directories to another share point using Time Machine?
Thanks in advance for any information on this or alternative ideas.
Greg

found the answer ;-)
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3247301

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

Time machine local to Network

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