Time Machine

[HawgGuy]

No joy for me using the above trick to set the default. I can confugure TimeMachine to select the NAS share, but it won't back up. The share is AFP and I can read & write to it normally. Searching the logs shows:

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x415b70'

[HawgGuy]

Followup from above. I deleted the preference file for TimeMachine and re-started and everything worked fine.

[stlblufan]

Time machine over the network -- problem solved.

Check it out here:

9to5mac DOT com/time-machine-fix-flux-capacitor-43262455

In order to get Time Machine to recognize your Infrant, first go to Finder and navigate to a share -- for example, Backup. Then open Time Machine and select "Choose a Disk" and viola -- it's there!!

[yalag]

Hey for those who have tried the defaults trick and got it working, are you guys have a size limit problem?

Everything works fine for me, except it backup doesnt seem to be able to get pass 120Gb (which so happens to be my full HD size). I check my NAS and it says 120Gb out of 500Gb so there are plenty of space. I'm not sure why this is the case since Time Machine should use up all the space right?

Also, assuming it somehow ran out of space, it should warn me before deleting old backup, but it never warns!

Any ideas???

[mdsinger]

Can anybody confirm that they got Time Machine working without any tweaks using the 4.0beta8 release and backing over AFP? I'm debating whether to run these hacks/tweaks or to just upgrade my NV+ to the beta.

FWIW, I got this working, and it seems to be working well.

1. I put Raidiator 4.0b9 on my NAS, and verified that the Bonjour based-browsing was working from finder. (I'm not sure whether or not Bonjour will play a factor in Time Machine's ability to mount the network share automatically, but I figure that it couldn't hurt.)
2. I created a share for TimeMachine named "TimeMachine" on the NAS.
3. I applied the system preference change mentioned earlier in the post by running this in Terminal:

Code: Select all

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

4. I mount the TimeMachine share by going into finder, browsing out to the "AFP on ..." link, and opening the TimeMachine share. (If you do not browse into the share, Leopard will not mount it and it will not appear in the time machine prefpane.)
5. Now, it can be selected in the TimeMachine prefpane.

At this point, Time Machine is able to automatically mount the share when the backup runs. I've made multiple backups, which all appear in the time machine GUI.

Also, I did NOT have to create the hidden file that indicates that time machine is supported on that share.

Hope this helps some of you.

[wwalkersd]

FWIW, I got this working, and it seems to be working well.

1. I put Raidiator 4.0b9 on my NAS, and verified that the Bonjour based-browsing was working from finder. (I'm not sure whether or not Bonjour will play a factor in Time Machine's ability to mount the network share automatically, but I figure that it couldn't hurt.)
2. I created a share for TimeMachine named "TimeMachine" on the NAS.
3. I applied the system preference change mentioned earlier in the post by running this in Terminal:

Code: Select all

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

4. I mount the TimeMachine share by going into finder, browsing out to the "AFP on ..." link, and opening the TimeMachine share. (If you do not browse into the share, Leopard will not mount it and it will not appear in the time machine prefpane.)
5. Now, it can be selected in the TimeMachine prefpane.

At this point, Time Machine is able to automatically mount the share when the backup runs. I've made multiple backups, which all appear in the time machine GUI.

Also, I did NOT have to create the hidden file that indicates that time machine is supported on that share.

Hope this helps some of you.

I did the same thing independently, although WITHOUT updating my NAS to 4.0b. It seems to working fine (I had to mount the share from the "Go" menu, and turn off CIFS on the NAS to get AFP mounts to work from Leopard, though). There is one catch, though. Leopard appears to be seeing all the free space on the whole volume as available, so it seems to me that it might let a single computer's backup grow until the entire NAS was full. I've tried to give TimeMachine it's own user account, with a quota, but TM still sees the whole disk. It remains to be seen what'll happen when it runs up against its quota limit. Assuming this works, the other downside is that you need to create a separate user account on the NAS for each computer to back up to. A good thing, I guess, from a security perspective, but awkward in that it may need to be separate from the user's own share, depending on how you want to use quotas. Right now, I have no quotas on users.

[Lucifer]

I used the solution proposed by mdsinger (TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1), and Time Machine is working like a charme: backup, browsing & restore.
FYI, I'm using a CIFS mount point and the NV firmware is v3.01c1-p6 [1.00a034]
FreD.

[chamoisb]

Any thoughts on this?

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/11/0 ... ort-disks/

Does the Ready NAS only send the ack when the data is written to disk?

Gilles

[mdsinger]

Any thoughts on this?

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/11/0 ... ort-disks/

Does the Ready NAS only send the ack when the data is written to disk?

Gilles

That sounds pretty reasonable, actually. I think we'd need someone from Infrant to lend a little insight into whether or exactly how Raidiator ack's writes.

[blimeyfool]

This worked great for me as well. I created a share on the ReadyNAS for each machine I wanted to back up and gave each of them a quota. Mounted it (manually since I have not upgraded to 4.0b). Did the "default write" command above and TM sees the shares. Picked the right one and it is backing up right now.

TM sees the space available on the share as the whole volume. What will happen when I get to the share quota that I set up?

Thanks to everyone who provided this fix!!

[pjc]

The fcntl method is used to talk to a physical disk not a network attached device. That's why they create the disk image on the remote volume. The remote image is controlled via a loopback driver that implements the function your referring to on HFS volumes.

You'd think so, but that appears not to be the case. When Time Machine is examining available shares to see whether they're supported, it's testing an fcntl(F_FULLFSYNC) call on the mounted directory. The results are:

ReadyNAS: returns ENOTSUP (45)
Tiger: returns EINVAL (22)
Leopard: returns OK (0)

(See this post and the following one.)

I don't know what's happening at the network level underneath this request, but I do find it interesting that the ReadyNAS (mounted via AFP) and Tiger return different errors. And somehow the loopback driver supports this fcntl() only when it's talking to a Leopard server.

But the underlying intent of F_FULLFSYNC (requesting that the physical drive flush its caches to disk) appears to be why Apple pulled the AirDisk support. See this article for more. I'm fine with the ReadyNAS lying if I'm on a UPS...

[nalenb]

I created a share on the ReadyNAS for each machine I wanted to back up and gave each of them a quota.

Why a separate share for each? It looks like it's creating a sparseimage for each to me, is there some reason not to keep multiples on a single volume?

[pauldy]

The fcntl method is used to talk to a physical disk not a network attached device. That's why they create the disk image on the remote volume. The remote image is controlled via a loopback driver that implements the function your referring to on HFS volumes.

You'd think so, but that appears not to be the case. When Time Machine is examining available shares to see whether they're supported, it's testing an fcntl(F_FULLFSYNC) call on the mounted directory. The results are:

Interesting discussion I think you guys are on the wrong track and need to look more at the afp code instead of focusing on code meant for physical disk access. For non-physically attached devices these calls will translate into an afp call that will make more sense for infrant to focus on implementing or more likely be able to pass off to whomever maintains netatalk at this point. In the meantime using the workarounds here seem to work fine.

[nathansvt]

Any thoughts on this?

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/11/0 ... ort-disks/

Does the Ready NAS only send the ack when the data is written to disk?

Gilles

That sounds pretty reasonable, actually. I think we'd need someone from Infrant to lend a little insight into whether or exactly how Raidiator ack's writes.

I agree, but I also think that if you're running your NAS with UPS power, journaling, and AFP then you're no worse off with TimeMachine than with rsync or a regular file copy.

If the NAS is failing to get data from RAM to DISK you've got big problems no matter what backup scheme you're using.

[wwalkersd]

TM sees the space available on the share as the whole volume. What will happen when I get to the share quota that I set up?

I was curious about this, too, so I put a "near" quota on the home share I was using. I soon got the following email:

Disk block quota exceeded on volume C for user 'wwalker'.

Disk space used: 50313 MB (Limits: 44000 MB soft, 55000 MB hard)
User 'wwalker' has 30 days of grace time to fall under the soft limit at
which time the user will be prevented from using additional disk space.

So that's the first phase. The real question, of course, is what happens when when the hard limit is reached and writes fail, even though TM thinks there's free space on the drive.

On a somewhat related note, I've been unable to establish simultaneous connections to the ReadyNAS from the same Mac under different usernames, which keeps me from having a separate backup share for each computer. Hmm, I guess maybe I could create a group for each backup and have a non-home share that's accessible only to that group. What I'm trying to accomplish, even though it's not important in my home network setup, is to provide privacy for the backups from different machines/users. I could see in a workgroup environment where you might not want Joe to have access to Nancy's backups.