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No Airdisk (Airport) Time Machine Backups!

bxs said:
You're missing the point.
Click to expand...
You are making an assumption that there is no other form of backup or safety net.

Given these (realistic) alternatives:

  • No backups
  • Keep using whatever current form of backup you use

If TM over AEBS with hack allows you to recover even one more file it is inherently useful.

B
 
I'm trying to set TM up over my Infrant ReadyNAS. I've created an HFS+ image and mounted it. I created the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file but can't change the ownership to root:admin. It ignores that command when I try. Something to do with the fact that I mounted it with my own username.

Anyone know how to change ownership of a specific file on a disk image to root:admin?

I tried mounting the drive as root to no avail.
 
I gotta side with bxs. Doesn't anyone here think that Apple didn't have a darn good reason for pulling support for this? Odds would seem to be pretty good that you'll run into whatever problem Apple found.
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As much of an Apple fanboy as I am I do not trust Apple to make those kind of decisions for me. I do believe Apple will make decisions based on market trends like balamw said, but more importantly I think Apple limits features because they view them as not "user friendly" enough and they have no problem screwing the more tech savvy of us.....

I just wanna try this out, test it for myself, and see if it can be a trustworthy backup solution. If not, I have a trusty rsync wrapper script that hasn't failed me yet.

Worst case: I have to physically plug in an eternal drive to use time machine. But the part that pisses me off about this the most is that in this age of wireless this and that i shouldn't have to do that. Should I?
 
Question - I have a Ethernet External Drive.. That is connected to my Airport that i access thru out my house and saved things on it.. It's a LACILE or whatever u called. So there is no usb plug i am able to use. Any Ideas...? Please?? Thanks!
 
Apparently someone figured out how to get it to work with AirDisk and possibly other Network Shares.

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=4396466#post4396466

smashingnick said:
First plug your airport disk directly to your mac and set up time machine to use it. If you want to let it back up now this is fine or you can stop it and let it back up when its plugged back into the AEBS.

Time machine creates a file in the root directory of the disk called ".(Some hexdecimal number)" it appears this file has to be in the root of the network shared directory. In my case I use user accounts to manage my airport disk so the directory that it actually shares out is called /Shared on my disk. So I simply move the .23468f43400 file or whatever it may be called to the /Shared directory. If you let it back up while plugged in locally you will also have to move the .sparsebundle file to the /Shared directory.

Eject the disk and plug it back into the AEBS and mount it via AFP and time machine should pick it right up. This method should work for any afp share not just airport disks.
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BUT my hard-drive is ETHERNET BASED.. not USB/FIREWARE connectable... and it connecs directly to the airport...
 
Nugget said:
I gotta side with bxs. Doesn't anyone here think that Apple didn't have a darn good reason for pulling support for this?
Click to expand...
It might be a business reason rather than technical. If they want to market the AEBS as a backup solution eventually, or perhaps the Mac Nano as a general home server, they don't want to make it easy to use an arbitrary remote machine for backups.

Browsing through posts, they've introduced some sort of hash in the form of a dot-file. So far, it seems this has to be generated locally. Perhaps backup to a remote Leopard box works because the remote box knows how to generate the hash. It might be fairly basic, e.g. based only on the volume name. Just like the hash required on the database for new iPods, this might be Apple's way of saying "we know you going to find a way around this, but we're going to make it difficult enough to discourage the vast majority."
 
The (chmod/chown - first) workaround definitely allowed Time Machine to see my Air Disks over the AEBS. It began the Time Machine backup as I saw a folder being created on the Air Disk and a dialog box with progression bar saying it was doing a backup; however, it soon locked up my system. (It didn't surprise me as iTunes with my Air Disks does it 90% of the time as well.) After hard rebooting, it would lock up anytime the Air Disk associated with Time Machine was attached (as it was most likely trying to do its work). I finally had to turn Time Machine off.

I am running a MacBook Pro with the non-gigabit AEBS. I have 3 different makes (WD, LaCie, and Maxtor) of USB drives attached to the AEBS formatted HFS. I have had similar issues with my AEBS and Air Disks under Tiger as well as Leopard. My AEBS is running f/w 7.1.1 and not 7.2.1. With the latter f/w, I couldn't even attach the drives.

I am going to go try the 2nd workaround, i.e., do the initial backup with a drive directly connected.
 
AEBS has some 'issues' with disk sharing!

My non-gigabyte AEBS also randomly disconnects disks on both wired and wireless connections. It also did the same under Tiger - it effectively renders it useless for any sort of regular backup so I had to resort to direct USB connection to my iMac.

Hopefully Apple will sort the disk sharing issues.

Has anyone got a Gigabyte AEBS? Do you get the same random disconnects of connected drives?
 
Can SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME..!! i am like being ignored. My HDD is a LACIE Ethernet Drive connected to my aiport Extreme.. not the (new N airport) the spaceship looking one. I can access my files and everything thru my work easily.. what can i do so i can access it thru time machine i am not able to connected via USB cuz it's Network Based Drive.. Please let me know. Thanks.
 
A@ron said:
Well thank me later :) I got it working fellas. It was there in front of our faces with the exception of doing a chown and chmod.

Someone else please confirm I will post steps.
1) disconnect airport disk and plug into computer as a USB drive directly.
2) Set up time machine to use this volume.
3) In terminal cd to volume "cd /Volume/HDD"
4) In terminal "touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported" this will create an invisible file.
5) In terminal "sudo chown root:admin .com.apple.timemachine.supported"
6) In terminal "sudo chmod 1775 .com.apple.timemachine.supported"
7) In terminal "ls -l -a" the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file should be -rwxrwxr-t
8) eject disk, unplug from mac, plug into Airport.
9) mount at mac using connect to server in finder (command k) and afp://airportname.local./HDname
10) see if time machine now sees the drive and tries to use it.
Click to expand...

I've been having major TM problems (it never finishes backing up). But, to test, I tried the steps above and they worked for (at least until TM died and I had to reformat the disk - twice).
 
Trying Aaron's solution

Thanks Aaron,

I'm trying to follow your instructions but get hung up at the cd /Volume/HDD command in Terminal--I'm not Unix-literate. I've been trying the name "Time Machine backups" which my Mac gave the drive in place of either "Volume" or "HDD" but I keep getting "no such file or directory" or "too many arguments" error messages. I'm sure it's not complicated but I can't find it.

Can you help?

Thx, Cidrolin
 
Got A@aron's workaround to work last night. TM saw the Airdisk that is connected to a non-Gig AEBS, and started the backup last night. Only problem was at some point the Airdisk "ejected" itself while I slept, so the backup didn't finish. I believe I left when over 1.0GB of 40.7GB was copied to the Airdisk. Will try again this week where I can watch it from start to finish.
 
NFS mount + HFS+ disk image?

Will this work with an NFS mount and an hdiutil-created HFS+ image?

I've tried the following:

* hdiutil create -type SPARSE -volname TimeMachine -size 100g -fs HFS+J -autostretch timemachine
* mv timemachine.sparseimage /Volumes/backup (this is an NFS mount)
* hdiutil attach -readwrite -owners on /Volumes/backup/timemachine.sparseimage

Then I followed your example commands to change the permissions/ownership of the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file.

However, Time Machine does not see the Volume. :( I can see it at /Volumes/TimeMachine, Time Machine just does not like it.

Any ideas?
 
CLuv said:
...I believe I left when over 1.0GB of 40.7GB was copied to the Airdisk. Will try again this week where I can watch it from start to finish.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, good luck with that. Bring the popcorn :)

No seriously - it seems to work for me. Plugged in the hard drive on my iMac, started TM, did a full backup because it seemed like a good idea at the time, ejected, connected the HD to the AEBS and mounted it. Icon is a TM drive. Started TM but message said "not enough space" because it can't use the already backed up data - it creates a sparse image which it mounts and then copies to that image (like SuperDuper! does when backing up to an airdisk).

So I had to delete the old files, then run TM again and now it's ticking away sloooooowly. Would probably take a few days to do a full backup of 350GB of data...
 
Djmx said:
Can SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME..!! i am like being ignored. My HDD is a LACIE Ethernet Drive connected to my aiport Extreme.. not the (new N airport) the spaceship looking one. I can access my files and everything thru my work easily.. what can i do so i can access it thru time machine i am not able to connected via USB cuz it's Network Based Drive.. Please let me know. Thanks.
Click to expand...

Why not plug in your hard drive to your ethernet port on your computer?
 
Wender, that is true, I don't know if I have enough popcorn here for that. Start to finish watching wouldn't be exciting at all. Glad I walked away and let it run while I went into D.C. for about 4 hours. Last night it had 40.7GB to back up, and tonight it's down to 29.08GB to complete. In the 4.5 hours it's been running it's done 3.94GB of the remaining 29.08. At this rate, it'll take another day of running to do the first full backup.
Maybe it'll be done by the time I wake up for work tomorrow. One can only hope.
 
mungler said:
its *multiple* hard links they had to put in.... as in multiple links to the same file. gah, i dunno, read the appleinsider article! ;)
Click to expand...

Actually, it's not the ability to hard link multiple files to the same inode - this is supported in most filesystems today - but the ability to create a hard link that points to a directory, which most filesystems (ext3, pre-Leopard HFS+, UFS, etc) do not allow.
 
Seems to work for me ...

Mine seems to work ...

I have a Macbook Pro and a Lacie D2 Extreme drive ... I plugged the drive in to the computer ... Activated Time Machine and away it went ... Once it had completed I removed it and attached it to my Airport Extreme ...

Time Machine recognized the drive and scheduled a full back up for later that evening as it said something about not being able to read my original back up (Can't quite remember what it said). It then took an absolute age to to do its first backup ... I'm talking 24 hours ish ... It's now doing hourly back ups as I would expect !!! All appears correct ... :)

I have the odd problem of the drive disconnecting and having to reboot the base station but I'm looking in to that ... :confused:
 
CookieMac, I would be interested in what you find out about the drive disconnecting and having to reboot the AEBS. I've been doing that a lot more now with TM enabled on the AirDisk. Had no real issues before at all.
Before individuals flame, yes I understand, this was removed by Apple and maybe this is a reason as to why it's been removed, so why take my chances? Trust me I understand, but it's so much easier then always having to plug and unplug the USB and power cord every time I want to use it, considering I use a laptop and I have another laptop accessing the AirDisk also.
 
Disconnecting ...

Right ...

I've done a couple of very minor experiments and this seems to be the best solution ... So far !!!

The problem is that my AEBS needs to be reset in order to allow access to the drive should I sleep my Mac or take it out of range. When it reconnects to the AEBS it will only try to reconnect to the drive as a guest and not as the registered user and so restarting seems the only way to sort this ...

My solution is that prior to you closing the lid, putting your mac to sleep or switching it off you need to eject the drive manually using the finder ...

When you switch the Mac back on, the drive should be rediscovered and mounted, although Time Machine still says waiting for a drive ...

You then need to give Time Machine a little nudge by exploring the drive in the finder just until it briefly displays the backup file ... (This file is one of the first I see and so I don't know if simply exploring the drive does the same thing.)

Time Machine will then see the drive and gets back on with it's job ...

Might try allowing the Guest access settings for the drive and see if that makes any difference ...

Anyone else got any suggestions or alternatives ??? :confused::apple:
 
CookieMac or A@aron, did any of you have issues with the 1st backup that is done wirelessly? Mine never seems to complete, since the drive keeps disconnecting at some point overnight. Then when I've tried to initiate a backup, it stays on preparing for hours and does nothing. Is it possible my DHCP Lease was causing this issue, since I had it on the default of 4 hours in the Airport Utility setup? I just changed it to 4 days to see if that would help.
Weird thing is, Time Machine would show no new backup, but stay Next Backup: When Drive Available, but it's still mounted and I could access it through Finder.

Thanks for your help and insight.
 
I officially threw in the towel, after many, many failed attempts, the wireless backup would never truly finish. So I broke down and bought a WD 250GB Passport Drive. It fits right underneath the iLap, and slides right into the front lip to stay secure.
I will wait until TM works on the AEBS after reading the following article:

http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ng_on_time_machines_airport_disk_support.html

Thank you all for your help.
 
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