Time Machine on SMB network drive

[fedecape]

Hello guys,

I have a Netgear Nighthawk 7500v2 with a USB HDD connected to it. I formatted it using Apple's Mac OS Plus + GUID and my Netgear picks it up no problem. The issue is that to connect to it, the SMB protocol seems to be the only way, and Time Machine refuses to see it.

Is there any workaround for this? I would really like to have my backups done through the network.

From my research / searching around, it looks like creating an image, mounting it and then telling Time Machine to work there is the only way. But this trick is a bit dated. Is this still the only solution?

Thanks!

 

[techwarrior]

Although SMB shares are supposed to work for TM with Sierra, apparently there are some specific extensions to the OOTB SMB that are needed to use it for TM. Perhaps Netgear hasn't done so. Details here.

NAS forums have offered a workaround as you mentioned, create a sparse bundle on the Mac, copy it to the NAS drive, then setup TM. I think that is still valid, or perhaps Netgear has a method to add the SMB extensions with a router update?

 

[kiwipeso1]

You can just use the MacOS server and make an external drive into your network time machine for any network user that is connected by SMB or AFP to the time machine drive on sharing. Takes about 2 minutes once you've got the server app on your desktop mac.

It's slightly more reliable than most routers, unless you have a very good router with recent firmware such as the Asus WRT on their AC wifi models of the last 4 years. Nighthawk may have some models nearly as capable as Asus routers.
Otherwise, I would suggest that you use a NAS if your router is not as fully featured as ones with WRT.

 

[fedecape]

Although SMB shares are supposed to work for TM with Sierra, apparently there are some specific extensions to the OOTB SMB that are needed to use it for TM. Perhaps Netgear hasn't done so. Details here.

NAS forums have offered a workaround as you mentioned, create a sparse bundle on the Mac, copy it to the NAS drive, then setup TM. I think that is still valid, or perhaps Netgear has a method to add the SMB extensions with a router update?

You can just use the MacOS server and make an external drive into your network time machine for any network user that is connected by SMB or AFP to the time machine drive on sharing. Takes about 2 minutes once you've got the server app on your desktop mac.

It's slightly more reliable than most routers, unless you have a very good router with recent firmware such as the Asus WRT on their AC wifi models of the last 4 years. Nighthawk may have some models nearly as capable as Asus routers.
Otherwise, I would suggest that you use a NAS if your router is not as fully featured as ones with WRT.

Thanks! I found that I can mount the network drive using afp://routerip and after running the showunsupported command on the terminal, it does show up in Time Machine. However, I have one quick question. When I'm at work, or the university campus, will my Mac still attempt to mount this drive? I wouldn't want my computer to be sending login requests with my password to, in my case 192.168.1.1 everywhere I go.

How does that work?


Thank you both in advance!

 

[kiwipeso1]

If you leave your local network, then all network connections within that network are dropped from your laptop, watch or iphone.
Unless of course you specifically setup a VPN to your home's router and login to your your home network from work or university, you just won't get your devices logging into a network it isn't on.

So relax, it's not going to connect to home unless you set your router up with a VPN service to login at home while you are out and about.

 

[fedecape]

If you leave your local network, then all network connections within that network are dropped from your laptop, watch or iphone.
Unless of course you specifically setup a VPN to your home's router and login to your your home network from work or university, you just won't get your devices logging into a network it isn't on.

So relax, it's not going to connect to home unless you set your router up with a VPN service to login at home while you are out and about.

But won't the Mac still attempt to mount these, subsequently sending my login information to whatever is present in that location's 192.168.1.1?

Also, Netgear says to use afp://routerlogin.net , a domain that in my case obviously redirects to my router's local ip (192.168.1.1). If I mount my Time Machine drive like that, wouldn't it be even more likely for a huge campus network to have a Netgear router picking up that domain redirect? What I don't want is to have my computer sending unsuccessful mounting requests everywhere I go.

On Windows, I usually mount my network drives using their network path \\WindowsBackup\TimsSurface\ - that way I know that these location will return an error / not found error everywhere but home.

I can't seem to be able to mount my Time Machine drive using its network path. (See attached screenshots, that's what I see on my router's config page)

Does any of this make sense?

Thank you in advance for your help!

 

[kiwipeso1]

But won't the Mac still attempt to mount these, subsequently sending my login information to whatever is present in that location's 192.168.1.1?

Also, Netgear says to use afp://routerlogin.net , a domain that in my case obviously redirects to my router's local ip (192.168.1.1). If I mount my Time Machine drive like that, wouldn't it be even more likely for a huge campus network to have a Netgear router picking up that domain redirect? What I don't want is to have my computer sending unsuccessful mounting requests everywhere I go.

On Windows, I usually mount my network drives using their network path \\WindowsBackup\TimsSurface\ - that way I know that these location will return an error / not found error everywhere but home.

I can't seem to be able to mount my Time Machine drive using its network path. (See attached screenshots, that's what I see on my router's config page)

Does any of this make sense?

Thank you in advance for your help!

No, in order for an external network to yours to appear the same network it needs to have :
a. the same wifi name.
b. the same wifi password.
c. the same wifi channel.
d. the same wifi ip range. (in your case, it would need to be 192.168.1.x)

As d is not going to be used for a campus network of over 250 devices, there is no chance that campus is going to be a problem unless by campus you mean a small secondary school. Also if work uses a network with secure login, then it is unlikely to use a default ip range identical to yours, and almost certainly not the same wifi password or wifi name.

The easy way you can check this without physically going to each network, is to open up keychain access and checking the login password for each network by simply using your mac's user login password to reveal the passwords individually.

Should take you a few minutes.

 

[techwarrior]

A couple of things you could do...

Leave TM off, and enable it when at home only.

Use something like TimeMachineEditor and set backups to occur nightly, when you are not at the campus. This automatically turns TM off, then wakes at the appropriate time to run a backup at the assigned interval. I have used this for years, and it works quite well, avoiding backups during the day when I often download large .iso and other SW for use on machines at work. These files are not kept long, moved to network drives, etc, so by scheduling TM to run at 10PM, it never has to backup these temporary large files.

Basically, TMEditor is a scheduler, the TM preferences you setup are left untouched, but it simply enables\disables TM based on whatever interval you choose.

Set it and forget it, last time I even looked at the app was probably 3 years ago and it has been faithfully scheduling nightly backups, through migrations to at least 3 different Macs, and several HDD replacements over time...all without touching the app.

 

[fedecape]

Thank you both, guys. Time Machine up and running !

 

[fedecape]

A couple of things you could do...

Leave TM off, and enable it when at home only.

Use something like TimeMachineEditor and set backups to occur nightly, when you are not at the campus. This automatically turns TM off, then wakes at the appropriate time to run a backup at the assigned interval. I have used this for years, and it works quite well, avoiding backups during the day when I often download large .iso and other SW for use on machines at work. These files are not kept long, moved to network drives, etc, so by scheduling TM to run at 10PM, it never has to backup these temporary large files.

Basically, TMEditor is a scheduler, the TM preferences you setup are left untouched, but it simply enables\disables TM based on whatever interval you choose.

Set it and forget it, last time I even looked at the app was probably 3 years ago and it has been faithfully scheduling nightly backups, through migrations to at least 3 different Macs, and several HDD replacements over time...all without touching the app.

Hello again guys.

So.. Time Machine has been very inconsistent this last week. It failed 50% of the time, and now it's not working at all. It's very weird because it seems to be working just fine on my girlfriend's MacBook Pro 2014.

I even tried to restore from a backup from this morning and I got a Case Sensitive formatting error. No clue why, as I manually formatted the HDD with the very default options.

My question now is, what is the cheapest way of getting this up and running? I do want daily backups, but I want them to be reliable. Is there any other device that I can attach to my router (I have USB 3, eSata, gigabit ethernet available)

Thank you in advance

 

[kiwipeso1]

Are you mounting both the drive itself and the disk image as separate network drives ?
If not, try that.

 

[techwarrior]

Sorry for not responding sooner, been out of town for a week or so... that is the problem with 3rd party NAS backups, the support is limited. You can try the forums for your router, but Apple probably won't be able to help much. My experience with 3rd party NAS drives has been hit or miss, so I went the Time Capsule route and no issues since.

 

[kiwipeso1]

It should work so long as you mount both the disk image and the actual drive as different SMB network drives.
Another thing you need to do is ensure that time machine backups happen at least every 10 day or more often, otherwise you will need to start again on a full backup.

Also, check your HDD with this list here : https://kb.netgear.com/18985/ReadySHARE-USB-Drives-Compatibility-List