Server and Time Machine

[skerfoot]

I'm setting up a mini with lion server on it as a home server. I've run into something I didn't expect. As far as I can tell, if I use the Time Machine service on the server it allows user computers to back up to the server, but all computers have to back up to a single drive. I can't designate one external drive for one computer, and separate drive for another. Am I getting this right?

Is the work around for this simply to not use the server time machine service, but instead just target time machine on each individual computer to an external drive attached to the server as a networked drive?

Sorry for the noob question, thanks.

 

[jackhdev]

I'm setting up a mini with lion server on it as a home server. I've run into something I didn't expect. As far as I can tell, if I use the Time Machine service on the server it allows user computers to back up to the server, but all computers have to back up to a single drive. I can't designate one external drive for one computer, and separate drive for another. Am I getting this right?

Is the work around for this simply to not use the server time machine service, but instead just target time machine on each individual computer to an external drive attached to the server as a networked drive?

Sorry for the noob question, thanks.

Yes, that is correct. Set up each external drive connected to the server (that you want to back up to) as an AFP share point on the server. Time Machine can back up through AFP. Then connect to the correct share point on each computer that you want to back up, and set this share point as a Login Item in the Users & Groups preference of System Preferences. Then set it in Time Machine preferences, and you're good to go!

 

[skerfoot]

Yes, that is correct. Set up each external drive connected to the server (that you want to back up to) as an AFP share point on the server. Time Machine can back up through AFP. Then connect to the correct share point on each computer that you want to back up, and set this share point as a Login Item in the Users & Groups preference of System Preferences. Then set it in Time Machine preferences, and you're good to go!

Thank you! The "Login Item" step was the one that I was missing to get this to work automatically.

 

[jackhdev]

Thank you! The "Login Item" step was the one that I was missing to get this to work automatically.

No problem, glad you got it working!

 

[jackhdev]

Thank you! The "Login Item" step was the one that I was missing to get this to work automatically.

Btw, I tried this myself and found it extremely annoying that a Finder window popped up to the share point each time I started up. I wrote this Apple script that does the same thing without being noticed. Just save this script as an application in AppleScript Editor and put the application in the Login Items section.

tell application "Finder"
	mount volume "afp://Server.local/sharepoint" as user name "username"
end tell

 

[skerfoot]

OK, so it wasn't working after all.

It's taken me a while to get back to this. Following the instructions above I successfully mounted some external drives on my server and targeted time machine backups to one of them. I have two identical USB drives and targeted two different computers to them, but only one worked. For the other, I kept getting this error:

"Time Machine could not complete the backup. The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features."

Now, after making some adjustments to how the drives were physically connected to the server, both give me this message.

I've looked at the sharing settings, and AFP is turned on. Has anyone else had this problem and found a solution? I reformatted one of the drives, and it didn't help.

Thanks

 

[kas23]

I too ran into this problem. Even looked high and low here and on the Apple boards and could not find a solution to this. However, this is one thread/solution I haven't seen before. I would like to know if it actually works.

Why Apple wouldn't allow multiple TM back-up volumes is beyond me. This was allowed in Snow Leopard. I just wanted to set up a simple server for my home. I can't imagine what a small business would think of this. But, I guess I can't really be surprised at this development considering what has happened to Xsan, FCPX, Air Port Utility 6.0, etc.

 

[skerfoot]

I'll try a slightly different question:

Does anyone NOT have this problem, i.e. you have more than one external hard drive connected to Lion Server via USB that you are successfully using as targets for time machine?

I'm just looking for confirmation that this is possible before I waste more time on it. As I understand it, it's theoretically easy to do, but so far it's beyond at least my capabilities.

At this point, I'm wondering if I need different hard drives, or drives that can connect by firewire, or if I should just break down and get one big drive and back everything up to one place the way that Lion Server really wants me to do it.

Thanks

 

[visual]

I'll try a slightly different question:

Does anyone NOT have this problem, i.e. you have more than one external hard drive connected to Lion Server via USB that you are successfully using as targets for time machine?

I'm just looking for confirmation that this is possible before I waste more time on it. As I understand it, it's theoretically easy to do, but so far it's beyond at least my capabilities.

At this point, I'm wondering if I need different hard drives, or drives that can connect by firewire, or if I should just break down and get one big drive and back everything up to one place the way that Lion Server really wants me to do it.

Thanks

Ermm, kind of...

Not Lion server, but A Mac mini running Lion
Not multiple USB hard drives but three separate partions on a single USB hard drive.

The USB hard drive has been formatted with a GUID Partion scheme, in Mac OS Extended format (journaled). In sharing I have added the drives and given the user accounts R/W access. I always thought it was bad practice to have multiple clients backing up to a single disk, unless OSX server does something different to client regarding managing storage allocation?

 

[belvdr]

Try this for each share:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14255868&timemachine#post14255868

 

[skerfoot]

Gave up

After going through all of the threads with possible solutions, I decided that I was more trouble than it was worth to go in and they to modify the guts of the machine just to use time machine on multiple drives. I think that it's a silly thing that Apple has done to design server time machine to only target a single drive for multiple computers, but so be it.

In the end, I decided to just use Chronosync and Chronosync agent to manage my backups. It may not have the pretty time machine interface, but it's much more versatile in its management. I've used it in other settings quite a bit, so I was happy to translate it to my home system.

Thanks for the help.