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

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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 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.

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

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 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.

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

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!

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

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!

OS X 10.5.3 update... Does Time Machine over network still work

Anyone updated to the new 10.5.3 and know if Time Machine still works over the network via AEBS?

I was hoping 10.5.3 would fix things for time machine/time capsule, I had issues with it hijacking my laptop and the network doing fsck_hfs. So I looked forward to fixes, had been doing only back up now, since having to reset everything. I tried it, it took an our to get past preparing, then had 15 meg out of 2 gig backing up, stuck there for hours. I finally killed it by dismounting the disk. When my disappointment reduces I may try a fresh start. I am sure they worked very had on it.

ITunes Library and Time Machine over network

Hello everyone,
I've got a 2008 unibody MacBook running Mountain Lion, I've been using Time Machine on a SeaGate external HDD, in addition to storing my iTunes Media on the drive. This external drive was always plugged into my computer via USB. Well the drive crashed so I've been looking into alternatives. I bought an Extreme Base Station and was hoping I'd be able to plug a similar external drive and achieve the same results wirelessly. After some research, it seems this is very unreliable. I've also come across a WD MyBookLive (NAS) which has a lot of software built in to act as an iTunes server and work with Time Machine (which sounds perfect), however I haven't gotten either of those functions to work. I'm guessing this might be a firmware issue on the MyBookLive, but it's also not letting me update it. What can you guys suggest? What would be the best way to make this work? Thanks in advance!

I could see this being a real issue for me. Is there any news on this front?
Here's my background/intention with TM:
1. I purchased a brand new MacBook for a family member, it's her first Mac experience
2. My wife and I have have MacBooks which we adore (Plus 3 iPhones in the family, Apple TV, AirTunes, the works -- Don't brand me as a "Mac Hater" which these forums love to do as soon as you point out an oversight. let's stay on topic, please!!)
3. We have a 500GB USB drive on my Wife's system for TM use
4. I have a 150GB USB drive for my own TM use.
5. In an effort minimize the amount of USB devices needed, I want to share my wife's 500GB drive for all of us to use TM with it. Seems logical, no?
6. Well, it's a MacBook it is mounted on so it will go to sleep at times, even go on the road.
Now, before people get excited (which they love to do here when you point out a potential issue with our beloved Macs) I fully understand the drive will not always be available. This is already the case as my TM drive is at home and I am at work with my MacBook as I type this. TM is not freaking out and will work happily when I mount the TM drive.
However, will my stepdaughter have a corrupted backup if she has the remote TM drive mounted when my wife puts it to sleep? Even if no backup is running?? My SD is rather sharp, she understands that to do a backup she needs to mount the share and click "back up now" on TM. But should she forget to unmount when she's done is in for disaster??? That wouldn't make sense but from I'm reading here it sounds like the case?

Time Machine over a network

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