The rather odd titular inclusion of November 2018 is to help others following in my footsteps, as I've come across a TON of really old / stale information on this topic.
I have 3 macs on my home network that I would like to back up with Time Machine. I would like to do this wirelessly to a single hard drive, which is a perfect use case for a router that has a network attached storage (NAS) device: I have a router (LinkSys WRT3200ACM) that supports a USB3 NAS drive, on which I'm running DD-WRT (v3.0-r35831 std 04/26/18).
As far as getting a NAS to show up under "Shared" in my Mac Finder, I found numerous helpful guides online on how to enable USB and NAS services in DDWRT, and then how to set up a Samba (SMB) server to expose the NAS on my network. Surprisingly, on a test run with an old thumb drive that I formatted as FAT32, and it worked really well and was quite easy (I can post a how-to once I get this sorted out).
Note that I used FAT32, because the DD-WRT firmware on my router has built-in support for this. ext4 was claimed to be faster, but one needs to purchase a Mac utility to be able to format a drive in ext4, and so I deemed this as waaay too much trouble.
The next step, getting the Time Machine application to allow me to see and select the NAS drive as a backup drive, has become the friction point. Depending on the era, one trick (circa 2010) is the good old
Apparently tweaking this unsupported preference will allow any NAS drive to show up in Time Machine's Select a Backup Disk list, such as the one I've attempted to expose over SMB. The rebuttal to this approach, in Pondini's reply at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2289666, is that it's unsupported for a reason, and that Apple limits Time Machine to "seeing" only drives hosted on OS 10.5-era Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) file service. (Note that Apple Filesystem (APFS) is not related to AFP.) Something about AFP's support for journaling in the face of the network interruptions that a NAS could expect to experience, although I would be very surprised to learn that SMB couldn't be utilized to provide recoverable journaling.
Another approach, which seemed to work for me, was to use Disk Utility to create a Sparse Image of say 500 gigs, which is how Time Machine works behind the scenes, and then plop the resulting .sparseimage 500GB file on my (Samba-hosted) NAS drive. Upon doing this, the Time Machine v1.3 that comes with my Mac OS X 10.13.4 install happily let me select the sparseimage "drive" as my backup disk in Time Machine.
Then I just heard of someone attaching the HDD to a Mac Mini, and simply using the Mac Mini (instead of the router) to expose the HDD as a network share for the various Time Machine instances, also works, but seems kind of klunky.
So has anyone made some good progress here, with suggestions as to which "trick" to use? Is this an old topic that has been kicked to death and, one thousand apologies, but I simply didn't see the thread in my surfings AND it still miraculously applies to the new technologies of this, our year 2018?
I have 3 macs on my home network that I would like to back up with Time Machine. I would like to do this wirelessly to a single hard drive, which is a perfect use case for a router that has a network attached storage (NAS) device: I have a router (LinkSys WRT3200ACM) that supports a USB3 NAS drive, on which I'm running DD-WRT (v3.0-r35831 std 04/26/18).
As far as getting a NAS to show up under "Shared" in my Mac Finder, I found numerous helpful guides online on how to enable USB and NAS services in DDWRT, and then how to set up a Samba (SMB) server to expose the NAS on my network. Surprisingly, on a test run with an old thumb drive that I formatted as FAT32, and it worked really well and was quite easy (I can post a how-to once I get this sorted out).
Note that I used FAT32, because the DD-WRT firmware on my router has built-in support for this. ext4 was claimed to be faster, but one needs to purchase a Mac utility to be able to format a drive in ext4, and so I deemed this as waaay too much trouble.
The next step, getting the Time Machine application to allow me to see and select the NAS drive as a backup drive, has become the friction point. Depending on the era, one trick (circa 2010) is the good old
Code:
defaults write come.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1Apparently tweaking this unsupported preference will allow any NAS drive to show up in Time Machine's Select a Backup Disk list, such as the one I've attempted to expose over SMB. The rebuttal to this approach, in Pondini's reply at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2289666, is that it's unsupported for a reason, and that Apple limits Time Machine to "seeing" only drives hosted on OS 10.5-era Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) file service. (Note that Apple Filesystem (APFS) is not related to AFP.) Something about AFP's support for journaling in the face of the network interruptions that a NAS could expect to experience, although I would be very surprised to learn that SMB couldn't be utilized to provide recoverable journaling.
Another approach, which seemed to work for me, was to use Disk Utility to create a Sparse Image of say 500 gigs, which is how Time Machine works behind the scenes, and then plop the resulting .sparseimage 500GB file on my (Samba-hosted) NAS drive. Upon doing this, the Time Machine v1.3 that comes with my Mac OS X 10.13.4 install happily let me select the sparseimage "drive" as my backup disk in Time Machine.
Then I just heard of someone attaching the HDD to a Mac Mini, and simply using the Mac Mini (instead of the router) to expose the HDD as a network share for the various Time Machine instances, also works, but seems kind of klunky.
So has anyone made some good progress here, with suggestions as to which "trick" to use? Is this an old topic that has been kicked to death and, one thousand apologies, but I simply didn't see the thread in my surfings AND it still miraculously applies to the new technologies of this, our year 2018?
