Topic: Has anyone used their SME server with Apple's OS X 10.4 Time Machine for backup?

[pearless]

I am interested in backing up my iMAC OS X 10.4 using Apple's builtin Time Machine application to my SME Server (ibay). 

While I have read a few articles on the web and it seems possible, has anyone got this working on their SME Server?

I have searched these forums, and I haven't noticed anyone doing this - If I have missed a posting, please point me to it

Cheers Douglas

[MSmith]

http://arcterex.net/blog/archives/2009/01/22/leopard_time_machine_backups_t.html

I think creation of the sparse backup file is the key to this sort of thing, as I've seen it mentioned elsewhere.  Try it out & write up a howto!

[pearless]

HOWTO get an iMAC 10.5.x (Leopard) to back up onto SMESERVER using Time Machine

The first step is to create an ibay and give it permissions so it can be read and written

Then mount the drive from your iMAC (from the "Finder" application, click on "Go" (at the top of the screen) to get a drop down menu and then click on "Connect to Server"

You need to open a terminal on your iMAC (from "Finder", again off the "Go" menu, select "Utilities", then from the dialog that appears, scroll down until you find "Terminal" and click on it)

In the terminal session, you have to tell the iMAC that it is ok to write to unsupported volumes, you do this by entering:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

then start up Time Machine

Select "Change Disk" and navigate to your ibay SMB share, you will note that "Backing up" starts to count down, this is OK.
Further, this backup will fail and that is OK,  what we are after is the name of the disk image that Time Machine will try to create.  You have a few tens of seconds to capture this, again from your terminal session, enter


ls -l

and you should find a file being created and its filename will end with something like iMac_00254bb771d8.tmp.sparsebundle

The key here is that that hexadecimal string which is actually the network MAC address of your iMac and you need to create a SPARSEBUNDLE diskimage on your local iMAC hard disk like this:

hdiutil create -size 200G -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE iMac_00254bb771d8.sparsebundle

NOTE: the filename at the end of the command and how it is different from the temporary filename create by Time Machine before it failed, there is no".tmp" in it, and it is just the last part of the filename.

Now move this file (which is really a diskimage) to your ibay, click on "Change Disk" and re-select your ibay, the "Backing up" will again start a count down, and then viola, it should start backing up!!!

Note: I tried directly creating the disk image on the ibay, but it refused, not sure why.

Cheers
Douglas.

[Stefano]

interesting.. worth to be in the wiki IMO

thank you