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[Guide] 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Time Machine backup to network share

sunkid

By sunkid,
in OSx86 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

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skabob11
skabob11
Posted
Posted

Success!

 

It can be confirmed that this method will not work if your target machine OSX is older then 10.5. Upgraded my Tiger machine to Leopard and backups started right away with the script @sunkid provided.

 

Thanks all!

zoob
zoob
Posted
Posted

One extra step if you do not have a UUID. I use Chameleon BTW.

 

Edit /Extra/com.apple.boot.plist

Add:

<key>EthernetBuiltIn</key>
<string>y</string>

 

This made it so that my computer could generate a UUID, because my /var/log/system.log was saying it couldn't get a UUID for my computer.

 

Then I was able to do part 3.b. It just backed up my whole Hackintosh!

PCMacUser
PCMacUser
Posted
Posted
I'm using 10.6.

(What protocol do you use (AFP, smb, nfs)?) I hate looking stupid but i dont even know what that means.

 

I have also tried something from this website

http://forums.mactalk.com.au/46/72807-time...age-10-6-a.html

 

No matter what i have tried Time machine always tries to create a sparsebundle and then fails.

 

Sorry, just realised you weren't referring to Snow leopard when you said op system, do you mean on my book world edition, i would have to try and find out.

Hi there,

 

I just got Time Machine working on my MyBook World Edition using sunkid's instructions (thanks sunkid!).

 

The important thing is to copy the plist file with the UUID into the .sparse file on your hard disk before copying it to the backup location.

 

To answer the question about which file system the MyBook WE uses, it's CIFS (SMB).

ShadowZephyr
ShadowZephyr
Posted
Posted

I figured it out to get this to work on Home Server

 

 

All you have to do is format the drive as HFS+, install MacDrive so that windows can access it, share it via SMB sharing, then use the guide on this page to make the sparsebundle. It's backing up for me as we speak!

Deadend12
Deadend12
Posted
Posted

Fabulous Script Mate... worked for me like a charm... after spending like 4 days trying to get this to work. Was nearly going to rip back down to 10.5 (What makes an upgrade an upgrade if it offers me nothing, and detracts from even a single function?). But no, absolutely lovely.

 

Just a note. The script whined at me for not having firewire or something (I have a 1st gen aluminum macbook), but I used the image anyways and it worked just fine.

methylparabex
methylparabex
Posted
Posted

Alright guys, I'm completely stumped. I've been trying to get this to work for days - I've tried the manual method and after a couple minutes of making the disk space available, I will receive error 45 no matter what. I am trying to back up to a Vanilla box of WHS, no HP MSS. I am currently running 10.6.1. But, when I try to use the script I receive this error:

 

sh ./makeImage.sh 600

: command not founde 7:

'/makeImage.sh: line 8: syntax error near unexpected token `

'/makeImage.sh: line 8: `usage ()

Could someone please help me? I'm a new mac user and would appreciate it greatly! Thank you!

 

Nick

sunkid
sunkid
Posted
  • Author
Posted
Alright guys, I'm completely stumped. I've been trying to get this to work for days - I've tried the manual method and after a couple minutes of making the disk space available, I will receive error 45 no matter what. I am trying to back up to a Vanilla box of WHS, no HP MSS. I am currently running 10.6.1. But, when I try to use the script I receive this error:

 

sh ./makeImage.sh 600

: command not founde 7:

'/makeImage.sh: line 8: syntax error near unexpected token `

'/makeImage.sh: line 8: `usage ()

Could someone please help me? I'm a new mac user and would appreciate it greatly! Thank you!

 

Nick

 

That's an odd syntax error! Try downloading the script again, maybe your download got corrupted.

methylparabex
methylparabex
Posted
Posted

Sunkid,

 

Honestly I thought that you were just blowing me off with an answer like that but I can confirm that after redownloading the script, it worked without a hitch. Quite simply, it just works. Thank you very much for your quick response and for your work. I was starting to get extremely frustrated. Thank you, thank you!

 

Nick

sunkid
sunkid
Posted
  • Author
Posted
Sunkid,

 

Honestly I thought that you were just blowing me off with an answer like that but I can confirm that after redownloading the script, it worked without a hitch. Quite simply, it just works. Thank you very much for your quick response and for your work. I was starting to get extremely frustrated. Thank you, thank you!

 

Nick

 

Glad to hear it worked. I was really a bit at a loss about this error since the script seems to work for others.

  • 2 weeks later...
dfrisby0
dfrisby0
Posted
Posted

Another happy backer-upper here!!!

Upgraded OSX 10.5.xx to 10.6.1 and backups broke

After following your 'manual' instructions worked perfectly first time MANY MANY THANKS

 

Client: iMac OSX 10.6.1

Backup Drive: Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo 1Tb NAS

itjstagame
itjstagame
Posted
Posted

Me too, I searched for hours with many suggestions and solutions but you're the only spot I've seen mention the MachineID.plist and that's all I was missing.

 

Now it's backing up fine. As was said it requires me to have the SMB share mounted (say /Volumes/backups), but always creates a /Volumes/backups-1 with root permissions and opens the .dmg volume from there. Odd but fine.

 

One remaining issue/mention, I'm not sure if it's just SMB related or you AFP users have the same problem, if you 'Enter Time Machine' and look at your backups, when you close that it does not seem to eject the DMG.

 

So if I 'Enter Time Machine' it creates the /Volumes/backups-1 mount, open the DMG and starts browsing, when I'm done I still have my DMG opened (/Volumes/NAS Backup but whatever you called your DMG image name in the manual step).

 

Now if it attempts to backup it'll create a /Volumes/backups-2 and will complain that the DMG is already in use and it stop backing up. I've always right-click ejected my DMG and 'umount /Volumes/backups-1' after 'Enter Time Machine' to keep it backing up happy. Anyone else had this issue?

 

 

One more I'll mention, but I think it's just my particular system/config, my 'Enter Time Machine' does not refresh correctly, I see no star field, just one Finder/browser window and if I click in the correct (bottom, right) area where the forward/back arrows are for going through the archives then it will update that Finder window with whatever historic version I want, but it won't draw the date or arrows or any of the normal Time Machine background. I'm assuming it's video driver related but thought I'd throw it out there in case others have the same issue.

 

 

Again, THANKS for this fix, I'm very happy to be backing up to RAID5 and not to an Airport Extreme.

waj
waj
Posted
Posted

Thanks, Sunkid! Last night, I had almost given up for the day after reading other people's stories and instructions (even those supposedly for Snow Leopard) with nothing to show for it but a lot of sparsebundles in the Trash. :) For what it's worth, I hit a few extra speed bumps along the way that I would like to share in case anyone else is in the same boat. I'll probably specify more than is relevant, just because that's the way I am. :D

 

Server: Crappy Dell notebook (one of my work computers, ugh), Windows XP (SP3), sharing a folder from a shiny new 1.5TB hard drive via SMB.

Client: MacBook Pro, Snow Leopard (10.6.1), with the aforementioned share mounted using a CIFS URL (e.g. "cifs://myserver1/TimeMachine")

 

To get this working, I had to:

1. Remove all stored credentials for the server from my keychain (tried this after reading http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=774097)

2. Authenticate to the server using an account local to that system. I had been using my domain credentials (e.g. "MYDOMAIN\username") to connect, and though that works fine for regular mounting, Time Machine didn't like it. Here are the relevant entries from system.log (last failure and first success):

 Oct 14 00:53:39 Newton com.apple.backupd[5055]: Starting standard backup
   Oct 14 00:53:39 Newton com.apple.backupd[5055]: Attempting to mount network destination using URL: smb://MYDOMAIN;myusername@myserver1/TimeMachine
   Oct 14 00:53:39 Newton com.apple.backupd[5055]: NetAuthConnectToServerSync failed with error: 80 for url: smb://MYDOMAIN;myusername@myserver1/TimeMachine
   Oct 14 00:53:44 Newton com.apple.backupd[5055]: Backup failed with error: 19
  ----------
   Oct 14 00:57:20 newton com.apple.backupd[5055]: Starting standard backup
   Oct 14 00:57:20 newton com.apple.backupd[5055]: Attempting to mount network destination using URL: smb://myothername@myserver1/TimeMachine
   Oct 14 00:57:20 newton com.apple.backupd[5055]: Mounted network destination using URL: smb://myothername@myserver1/TimeMachine
   Oct 14 00:57:25 newton com.apple.backupd[5055]: Disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine-1/Newton.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
   Oct 14 00:57:25 newton com.apple.backupd[5055]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

 

3. Run sunkid's script as root (e.g. using sudo). Even after the above messages, it would still appear to start the backup, then time out with another error (sorry, can't find that one in the log to quote), until I did this.

 

One everything was working on the crappy Dell, I just moved the drive to my girlfriend's shiny fast 24" Aluminum iMac, on which she is running Windows 7. [side note: It's not as crazy as it sounds; Star Wars Galaxies and EQII are the most important apps to her and they just don't run that well in a VirtualBox VM!]

 

Anyway, I then shared the TimeMachine folder on that system, mounted it on the MBP (again, not saving the credentials), switched target disks in Time Machine, removed everything from the Time Machine exclusion list, and got about 100GB backed up to it overnight before I packed up the MBP to head to work.

gilesrowland
gilesrowland
Posted
Posted

Thanks so much for this. Fingers crossed working nicely for me now.

 

Apple are real f***ers, breaking/disabling this in 10.6. I'm sure it's to sell more of their TimeCapsules. I might have bought one, had recent reports shown them as only lasting around 17 months. That's not much good for a backup solution! I am backing up to an old iBook (> 6 years) with a Drobo attached - my home server.

 

One important thing I learned from all the threads on this topic is that if you are backing up to a Mac OS machine running anything older than Leopard, you need to mount the backup share with SMB not AFP. For some reason TimeMachine is not able to keep AFP shares before Leopard mounted for backup. I have SharePoints on the iBook host an SMB share for the TimeMachine backups.

John Biesi
John Biesi
Posted
Posted

I would like to thank everyone for the article and helpful pointers. The "manual method" was by far the easiest and most efficient approach that I tried.

 

I do want to point out one thing to people who are experiencing issues... Most of my issues seemed to be related to file permissions. I received the following errors on my first attempt (no names have been changed, as I'm not innocent):

 

VN-LPT-JJB-2:/ jbiesi$ cp -pfr VN-LPT-JJB-2.sparsebundle Volumes/backup/VN-LPT-JJB-2.sparsebundle

cp: chflags: Volumes/backup/VN-LPT-JJB-2.sparsebundle/com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist: Invalid argument

cp: chflags: Volumes/backup/VN-LPT-JJB-2.sparsebundle/Info.bckup: Invalid argument

cp: chflags: Volumes/backup/VN-LPT-JJB-2.sparsebundle/Info.plist: Invalid argument

cp: chflags: Volumes/backup/VN-LPT-JJB-2.sparsebundle/token: Invalid argument

 

Fortunately, I was able to perform a simple Drag and Drop copy with Finder and Time Machine is currently working! (I will re-post if it doesn't work after I reboot). I would love to delve deeper into why that worked when the all powerful command line failed, but my busy life won't allow me the time.

 

For completeness, my configuration consists of Snow Leopard (10.6.1) on a MacbookPro4,1 and a network SMB share on an OpenFiler server. The SMB credential is my personal Active Directory login (ie. <DOMAIN>\<user>), and I verified in Keychain Access that the credential is identical on both the "login" and "System" keychains.

 

A final word... Backups are only good if you have the ability to restore from them. I have no doubt that restore a single file should be a snap with Time Machine using a NAS, however I have yet to see anyone claim they have done a full system restore from a sparsebundle on a NAS. I prey that I won't have to hack together a solution for that, but finding some evidence of it being done would put my mind at ease.

 

Thanks so much for this. Fingers crossed working nicely for me now.

 

Apple are real f***ers, breaking/disabling this in 10.6. I'm sure it's to sell more of their TimeCapsules. I might have bought one, had recent reports shown them as only lasting around 17 months. That's not much good for a backup solution! I am backing up to an old iBook (> 6 years) with a Drobo attached - my home server.

 

One important thing I learned from all the threads on this topic is that if you are backing up to a Mac OS machine running anything older than Leopard, you need to mount the backup share with SMB not AFP. For some reason TimeMachine is not able to keep AFP shares before Leopard mounted for backup. I have SharePoints on the iBook host an SMB share for the TimeMachine backups.

 

With respect to TimeCapsules breaking down after 17 months, that's exactly my experience. The power supply got flakey one day and then complete gone the next. I found some very helpful forums because Apple was completely unsympathetic, but ultimately decided to go the standard NAS direction so I can put some more sophisticated network hardware in at home.

dopey423
dopey423
Posted
Posted

can someone please help me? i have done the manual process and cannot get time machine to recognize the new sparsebundle. My computer's share name is "iMac" and everytime i try and backup, time machine keeps creating a sparsebundle called, "iMac 1.tmp.sparsebundle"

 

i cannot get this working for the life of me.

 

please help!

 

i mounted the iMac.sparsebundle volume to the computer to drag/drop the .com plist file.... this is the code i have inside of it

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

<key>com.apple.backupd.HostUUID</key>

<string>85092F1B-9962-5FD9-AEEB-8F61XXXXXXXX</string>

</dict>

</plist>

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