OLD: Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS

[imagenes_vivas]

I am a professional photographer who just bought my first ReadyNAS NV+ with 4x1TB disks (in X-Raid and with the lastest firmware) to work with all my digital pictures files (Now around 1,3 TB, but growing fast).

In our office we are 3 people working who need to access the pictures, so we connected the ReadyNAS to our Gigabit Ethernet network connected by AFP to our three Macs, two of them running Leopard. We transferred all the images from our currents LaCie 1TB Firewire 800 external drives to the ReadyNAs and until now all is going well and pretty fast.

I have read several messages in this forum about using Time Machine to backup the data from one or several Macs to one ReadyNAS. But we would like to do the opposite: to have the original files and work on them in the ReadyNAS, and to backup them to our two previous LaCie 1TB external Firewire hard disks.

These drives only have Firewire 400 and 800 connections (no USB2) so we cannot connect them directly to the ReadyNAS, only to a Mac connected to the Gigabit Network.

Today we tried to make our first backup from one ReadyNAS share with part of the pictures to one of these 1TB Firewire disks. Time Machine has no problem to select the LaCie disk as a Destination, but cannot recognise the ReadyNAs Share mounted in the Mac desktop as a source.

Is there a way to do that? Or is not possible with Time Machine and we have to backup the ReadyNAS to our external Firewire drives with Chronosync or Retrospect?

Any help welcome, and have a Happy New Year!

[drakino]

Time Machine is a local only backup utility, and will not back up a drive attached over the network like the ReadyNAS shares. The reason being is that Time Machine depends on file system notifications to be told what files were modified for the incremental backups, and only an OS X Leopard system makes the proper notifications for Time Machine to use.

Chronosync or Retrospect should work, as will many UNIX based commands like rsync if your willing to dive into the Terminal.

[imagenes_vivas]

Thanks for your answer! Until now we did backups with Lacie Silverkeeper backup software (not Leopard compatible now) or Chronosync. I like Chronosync, buti it seems from some comments in this forum that Chronosync has problems with ReadyNAS. I am going to try.

[btaroli]

bzzzt! Sheep going to slaughter here...

Time Machine can absolutely be used with network shares, though they should be AFP-based for compatibility with the way it keeps it's files. This is a not a ReadyNAS specific issue, which is probably why you'd have better luck finding info about how to do this by doing an Internet-wide search.

The solution I used (and yes, I am using Time Machine via AFP with my NAS) is located at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071028173642747. In short,

1) Open a terminal window on your Mac and run "sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1".
2) Create an AFP share on your NAS to use for backups.
3) Mount the share.
3) Open system preferences and go to Time Machine.

For safety, I am also leveraging the Retrospect license that came with my NV+ to keep a separate backup as well. This is prudent since this mode of operation for Time Machine isn't supported fully by Apple -- though it was reportedly part of the original specification for it, which is why I expect the option to subvert the local-only volume rule even exists at all. But if you want the functionality of Time Machine and don't mind keeping a separate backup for insurance purposes, it does work quite well.

[csdb]

btaroli is right, you can use Time Machine with Ready NAS if you "reactivate" some functions that Apple disabled when they introduced leopard.
The link he gave is excellent, but not for the faint of heart ... (using terminal to tweak OSX requires some knowledge of UNIX commands).

Be extra careful though as the "reactivation" will not protect your data in case of sudden interruptions of a back-up (removal of target disk, Ethernet or wifi problems, ...). Time machine currently lacks a confirmation stage in backing up data.

This is supposed to be solved in the next iterations of 10.5, as Apple will "re-activate" the Network Backup feature of Time machine.

You might want to wait two weeks until Macworld expo ..., Apple might release a new update by then.

[imagenes_vivas]

Thanks all for your help. As I never opened the Mac Terminal and have no idea of UNIX (I am a photographer, not a computer expert!) I am going to wait a while until a Time Machine update.

I have found in internet some possible tweaks to do to Time Machine software who permits that, but it seems that if you done it, when the backup disk is full, Time Machine do not warns the user to delete one of the backup versions but deletes ALL the backup versions without warning.

[shacker]

Well, I've run

Code: Select all

sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

and restarted both the ReadyNAS and the Mac, but my backup AFP share still does not show up as an available Time Machine volume.

Other suggestions? Thanks.

[davidtay]

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

or

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes -bool yes

work for me. It also helps when the afp share is connected via ethernet

[thedonga]

also know that by default your Mac does not utilize case sensitivity, while the ReadyNAS does. While this doesn't matter very much when you are backing up to the ReadyNAS....it will mean a lot if you attempt to restore.

You can format your Mac drive for case sensitivity...


whatever you do, just be careful and aware this is an issue.

[btaroli]

It also helps when the afp share is connected via ethernet

Yes, it's important to note that the volume list in the Time Machine settings panel is not a network browser. It will only show candidate mounted volumes. So you'll need to mount the AFP share, set the option as indicated, and then open the Time Machine preferences.

Also note that once you have selected a network volume, TM will auto-mount it for backups as necessary.

[btaroli]

also know that by default your Mac does not utilize case sensitivity, while the ReadyNAS does.

Well, when it's "unix" I demand case sensitivity, so I always format my HFS+ volumes that way. In fact, I think it is the suggested mode in general...

[thedonga]

great, just making sure..

[KAC]

also know that by default your Mac does not utilize case sensitivity, while the ReadyNAS does. While this doesn't matter very much when you are backing up to the ReadyNAS....it will mean a lot if you attempt to restore.

......

Why is that?

[thedonga]

HFS+ up until Tiger (10.4) was not case-sensitive, so a file named "AAAA" was treated the same as "aaaa". In addition OS X was case-preserving, so it kept the files as "aaaa" and "AAAA".
So let's say you have two folders on your case-insensitive Mac named "Abbas Greatest Hits" and "ABBAs Greatest Hits". The Mac treats them as the same folder, but when you copy them over to the ReadyNAS it creates two separate folders. Ok for now....
But when you attempt to copy them back to the Mac, you will get a failure and the copy job will exit.

Time Machine may fare a bit better because it is a sparse image, haven't played around enough with it to find out though.

You have the ability to format your drive as Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive/Journaled). This is not the default when installing, it is still Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Look at the properties of your volume to see which way you have installed OS X. The reason it is still not case-sensitive is some applications on Macs can't handle case-sensitive file names or folders.

You may remember a lot of people having problems with Photoshop CS3 until Adobe patched it for Leopard....this is why.

[shacker]

Ah... actually mounting the backup share did the trick. I had assumed that the TM prefs window would function like a Finder window (let me browse to the share).

Working now! Thanks.