25 April 2012

Mac Time Machine to Windows Network Share

These are my notes based on Adam Pash's original post which didn't quite work as written for me:
An Easier Way to Set Up Time Machine to Back Up to a Networked Windows Computer
The whole process worked fine until the running of the shell script (step three in the original notes). Not being a native Unix user I forgot about assigning run privileges:
  1. Setup a share on your Windows server: Create a folder then right click, select Properties, Share tab and add necessary permissions for your user(s).
  2. Mount the share in Mac OS: Finder, Go, Connect to server then type:
    smb://[server name]/[share name]
    This will mount the folder in Mac at /Volumes/[share name]
  3. Enable Network shares for Time Machine: Type the following into Applications, Utilities, Terminal:
    defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
  4. Download a shell script available in the original post at: http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/11/makeimage.sh
  5. Change to the Downloads directory and make it executable:
    cd Downloads
    chmod +x makeimage.sh
  6. Run it with two parameters: the size of the backup share and the location:
    sudo ./makeimage.sh 200 [location e.g. /Volumes/TimeMachine/]
    Where 200 is the size in GB of the backup and [location... is the mount point of the network share mentioned above.
    When done it should say "Finished! Happy backups!"
  7. Open Time Machine and select the new share
Once again all credit goes to Adam Pash for his post and "sunkid" who wrote the makeimage script.

UPDATE: This does not work on Lion 10.7.3 where you get "The network drive does not support the required AFP features". I have found another page with an idea of how to approach it on Lion but haven't tried it myself:
http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu/davekonopka/2011/07/connect-os-x-lion-time-machine-to-a-network-drive/

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