No Airdisk (Airport) Time Machine Backups!

[cmarshall]

Correction

It DOES work with Wireless if the initial backup was done via wired, but there seem to be a couple of caveats:

1) As mentioned, it is S L O W. Darn near unusable.

2) The first time I tried the Wireless connect, I used the Finder "Go" menu, and selected the same volume as I had the wired connection. Trying to use that resulted in Time Machine acting as if there was no previous backup.

However, the second time I tried it, I used a shortcut saved from the wired connection, and that works (albeit slowly). Not sure what the difference can be. There may have been other factors of which I'm not aware.

I will say that Time Machine is not at all efficient, and was obviously not designed for network backup. My wife's computer with the directly connected FW800 drive is wonderful.

 

[ascender]

I set this up for the two Macbooks in our house today to see what it was like. I'm just backing up the user directorys to a My Book connected via USB to the Airport. I have to say I was expecting the worse, but so far so good. I wasn't quite sure what would happen when I tried this, but I'm delighted with the results. Yes, the initial backup took a good few hours for 9Gb or so, but Time Machine is fully functioning on both now, so all is well.

I'm not sure why Apple didn't implement this with some sort of caveat that the first, full backup should be done while directly connected. Then Leopard would recognise the disk once it went across to become an Airport Disk.

 

[chem]

Like everyone else, I have a USB external backup drive and an AEBS.

Apple is never, ever going to get me to buy a "Time Capsule" to replace my AEBS+external. Just make Time Machine work with my damn AirDisk!

I have no problem plugging the disk into my laptop once a week to back things up. No extra $299 from me, Steve.

 

[rockstarjoe]

Has anyone gotten this to successfully work with a Buffalo Terastation? I have a 1TB terasystem, and don't really feel like shelling out for a Time Capsule just to do my backups over the network.

I ran the terminal command, and I can now see my Terastation shares in the Time Machine options to select a drive. However, if I choose one of the drives Time Machine will try to back up and then say that the backup failed. Anyone have any ideas why? Thanks for any help!

 

[RedTomato]

Has anyone gotten this to successfully work with a Buffalo Terastation? I have a 1TB terasystem, and don't really feel like shelling out for a Time Capsule just to do my backups over the network.

I'm also interested. I have the Buffalo 500 gb netstation version, which I brought specially for Time Machine.

Just had a tricky conversation with my boss yesterday where I had to explain I'd jumped the gun in buying the Buffalo, and that maybe we should buy the Time Capsule instead...

 

[cmarshall]

I Have It Working. Here's How:

1) I have an AEBS.
2) To it, I connect a 1.6TB Drobo. It is formatted and empty.
3) I set up the AEBS to share the disk using accounts and Bonjour (I think the Bonjour may be important).
4) In the terminal, I type:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
5) I use a direct wired Ethernet (1GBps) connection to the AEBS for the initial backup.
6) I let the initial backup run COMPLETELY. In my case, this took two days.
7) I make an alias to the Time Machine disk on my Mac.
8) I unplug the Ethernet, and connect to the AEBS using wireless.
9) I use the alias to mount the disk.
10) I select the mounted disk as my TM disk.
11) I do a "Backup Now."
12) The backups happen automatically from then on.

I have to make sure I do at least one authentication after restart. The backup will mount the backup drive automatically, even if the disk is not mounted, as long as the initial authentication has been done to unlock the key chain.

Browsing TM over wireless is S L O W. You need to wait quite a while for it to load up.

I've been backing up since December, and I have done a couple of restores.

It works. The Drobo knocks the Time Capsule into a cocked hat. It's as good as (or better than) a RAID 5 drive.

 

[iPhil]

1) I have an AEBS.
2) To it, I connect a 1.6TB Drobo. It is formatted and empty.
3) I set up the AEBS to share the disk using accounts and Bonjour (I think the Bonjour may be important).
4) In the terminal, I type:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
5) I use a direct wired Ethernet (1GBps) connection to the AEBS for the initial backup.
6) I let the initial backup run COMPLETELY. In my case, this took two days.
7) I make an alias to the Tim Machine disk on my Mac.
8) I unplug the Ethernet, and connect to the AEBS using wireless.
9) I use the alias to mount the disk.
10) I select the mounted disk as my TM disk.
11) I do a "Backup Now."
12) The backups happen automatically from then on.

I have to make sure I do at least one authentication after restart. The backup will mount the backup drive automatically, even if the disk is not mounted, as long as the initial authentication has been done to unlock the key chain.

Browsing TM over wireless is S L O W. You need to wait quite a while for it to load up.

I've been backing up since December, and I have done a couple of restores.

It works. The Drobo knocks the Time Capsule into a cocked hat. It's as good as (or better than) a RAID 5 drive.

So you think the drobo worth the green backs?


I'll wait for apple supplied support for AEBS backup solution..

 

[tfire67]

This Really Sucks Steve

Time Machine is a big reason why I upgraded to 10.5, only to find out I can't even use my AEBS + ext. HD for Time Machine. I hated MS for this type of thing and I don't like the fact that this FEELS like bait and switch. I could be completely wrong here but should we be seeing a C.A. lawsuit over this issue? I mean, they advertise this thing as if it's fully functional without much caveat about hardware, then when it doesn't work I see all this advertisement about these Time Capsules.

I hope they fix this soon, I'm almost tempted to return my copy of 10.5 but would hate to have to uninstall, yuk...

 

[cmarshall]

So you think the drobo worth the green backs?

Yup. It is RAID 5 stability at a fraction of the cost. Awesome piece of kit. It is not a speed demon, however, so it's an ideal network drive. I got a good deal on mine. I have 1.6TB of heavy-duty storage, and it cost me about $700. Normally, it would be about $850 ($450 for the Drobo, and $100 each for 500GB drives). Still a tremendous value when compared to RAID 5 arrays. The ones we use at work cost $5,000 - $7,000 each for 1.5TB systems.

I'll wait for apple supplied support for AEBS backup solution..

In that case, I will just switch it over to their system, which I won't use unless it supports this configuration. This has worked flawlessly for me. I now suspect that the reason they disabled network TM backups was so they could sell the Time Capsule. The Time Capsule is a single delicate disk. The Drobo is a hot-swappable array of striped disks. I don't see Apple being able to beat that.

I'm a pro, and I don't mind putting in the extra effort and know-how to get this solution working. It is not a solution I'd recommend for consumers. It also means that you gotta lock down your network pretty well. This goes for Time Capsule as well. The AEBS doesn't have a good firewall in it. I use a Linksys router as a firewall, and the AEBS is behind that. I use the AEBS for wireless, in full "tinfoil hat" mode.

 

[rockstarjoe]

I managed to get it to work with my Terastation by using the "enable unsupported drive" terminal command... it turns out the error I was getting was caused by the fact that I didn't have enough space to do a full backup (duh!).

Anyway it took about 2.5 days to do the first backup (ethernet), but then I had a lot of problems trying to re-mount the time machine disk after restarts, and it had a lot of issues when actually trying to browse time machine backups. So I decided that I am going to hold off on using this feature until it is supported by apple. Back to using Backup for now.

 

[cmarshall]

Remounts

I managed to get it to work with my Terastation by using the "enable unsupported drive" terminal command... it turns out the error I was getting was caused by the fact that I didn't have enough space to do a full backup (duh!).

Anyway it took about 2.5 days to do the first backup (ethernet), but then I had a lot of problems trying to re-mount the time machine disk after restarts, and it had a lot of issues when actually trying to browse time machine backups. So I decided that I am going to hold off on using this feature until it is supported by apple. Back to using Backup for now.

I had to use an alias I created from the mounted Ethernet drive to re-mount the drive in Wireless (takes a bit of time, as it has to try wired first). For some reason, browsing to the drive in the Network Browser didn't work. The TM backup will re-mount the backup image (without re-mounting the actual drive -sort of strange) without any intervention, as long as the Keychain has been unlocked, and you have the drive account set up in the Keychain.

I'm not kidding. This works, and works well, but it took me a week of trial and error to get to this point. The steps I outline above are what I did to make it work.

 

[CLuv]

Zippy chance a C.A. lawsuit will happen, especially when Apple disclosed "features are subject to change" before Leopard ever shipped.

 

[Cinemagic]

Great info. This is working for me like a champ! I did have a little glitch, however. I had a USB backup that was already in use. I attached it to my Airport and ran the script. The drive was recognized and was selected. But I could not access backups nor could I add a backup. I reconnected the drive directly to my MacPro and did a re-format. Now with a clean drive, I reconnected it to my Airport. Now everything seemed to work properly. The backup went well and I can access the backup volume. Withe such a simple solution to wireless Time Machine, it makes me wonder what Apple knows that we don't. There must be a specific reason it was disabled. Some may think it's so that they can make it specific to their new Time Capsule. May be just that. I did notice that while Time Machine is doing it's routine hourly backup, Internet access is noticeably slower. Maybe they are trying to make it backup only when there is no other wireless traffic. Whatever the case, I very much like the wireless TIme Machine and appreciate the information.

 

[cmarshall]

One Caveat

If you use Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, updates and changes to the installs can cause the whole virtual disk to get "touched."

I did this yesterday. I ran Windows updates on all my VMs, and was stunned at how long the backup took (I had to truncate it. I hope I can finish it tonight).

I have a wired cable that I run when I see more than about 1GB needs backing up. Even so, I couldn't finish half my backup before leaving for work this morning.

 

[edd-d]

This is how I see it might turn out or how it might be:

Like others have said there just isn't a secure way to backup wirelessly for any drive [which sounds iffy because if you can access any AirDisk naturally, why can't you just send files to it... I may just not understand the how TM works all that well].

Apple still hasn't been able to fix a possible problem with TM - AirDisk backups or its something their still working on [as it was a feature in one of the 10.5.2 builds] and will be unveiled maybe around the time Time Capsule comes out or shortly afterward [this seems to be the most optimistic]

Additionally, they may not like the speed issue with how long it takes. I mean, how long would the average user want to wait for a large backup or even the initial backup if it were to take two days? Wasn't the point of Time Machine to make backup easy for the average user? [Hence Time Capsule to take care of everything].

Finally, Apple's laughing it up for possibly selling more AEBS and now is going to make a buck off of Time Capsule.

10.5.2 was released today and no AirDisk backups... I still have some hope but I might be stupid for thinking so.... I mean, they can't fully ignore the customer... can they?

 

[cmarshall]

Time Capsule

Additionally, they may not like the speed issue with how long it takes. I mean, how long would the average user want to wait for a large backup or even the initial backup if it were to take two days? Wasn't the point of Time Machine to make backup easy for the average user? [Hence Time Capsule to take care of everything].

The speed issue is a real concern. Big backups (even over 1Gbps Ethernet) take FOREVER with TM. A HUGE part of this is the "Preparing" phase. Some of that is probably the old backups being sorted out, etc., but a lot of it is probably a file-by-file comparison with what's on your machine. Time Capsule probably has a client/server architecture, like most modern VCS systems.

I won't use TC, because it is a single delicate disk, and I really need my Drobo, with its 4 robust disks. If they came out with a "TC AEBS," I'd get it in a heartbeat.

I mean, they can't fully ignore the customer... can they?

You mean Steve "Reality Distortion Field" Jobs? Oh, yes he can.

 

[Richardismac]

Time Machine Problem

I am having a real big time machine problem

ok so i have my LaCie 500GB hard drive connected to my Airport Extreme Basestation. and i go to Time machine Preferences and it says backing up and it completes and does that every hour, it has done this for a day going on two days and when i go to time machine in my dock the time machine program runs and goes to the screen. and i can't go "back in time" to view my old files. now i deleted a file that i didn't need just to see if i could view it but i couldn't go "back in time"


Someone help me with this i want to be able to use this wonderful program, someone help me with this

thanks

 

[cmarshall]

I am having a real big time machine problem

ok so i have my LaCie 500GB hard drive connected to my Airport Extreme Basestation. and i go to Time machine Preferences and it says backing up and it completes and does that every hour, it has done this for a day going on two days and when i go to time machine in my dock the time machine program runs and goes to the screen. and i can't go "back in time" to view my old files. now i deleted a file that i didn't need just to see if i could view it but i couldn't go "back in time"


Someone help me with this i want to be able to use this wonderful program, someone help me with this

thanks

It sounds like the first backup did not complete from start to finish. The symptoms you describe are exactly the ones I encountered when that happened. Also, you need to give subsequent backups enough time to complete, which can be damn slow over wireless. If a backup is not allowed to complete (Preparing-Backing Up-Finishing), then it won't appear in the backups.

Once you have the first backup complete (I suggest using wired Ethernet, because it can take a couple of days), then you need to use an alias to the mounted backup disk to enable subsequent mounts, and select the disk in the prefs when it is mounted the first time (don't disconnect after the first backup then use the Go Menu to remount -that didn't work for me).

I'd suggest wiping the drive, and starting from scratch using exactly the process I outline in my post.