MP 1,1-5,1 Using Mac Pro 5,1 HDD as Time Machine Backup?

[GlynH]

Hi there,

I have a selection of Macs including the 2010 5,1 in the thread title, 2013 MP 6,1, 2013 MacBook Air, 2012 MacBook Pro 13 & 15, 2012 Mac Mini and the new-to-me 2019 MacBook Pro 16" and am setting up a backup regime for these and hopefully also an HP Spectre X360.

Plan is to upgrade the 1TB in the Spectre to 2TB and also retire most of the older MacBooks having safely stored all their data so I can copy anything relevant to the newer MacBook as and when needed and then backup that on a regular basis.

To achieve this I have a 16TB Seagate EXOS in HDD Bay 1 in the 5,1 created a folder on the root called Time Machine and created folders named after each Mac I want to backup within that.

Then from within Sharing I enabled both SMB & AFP then Ctrl-Click to choose Advanced options and Share as time Machine backup destination on each folder.

On each Mac to be backed up from Time Machine preferences I choose Select Disk and I can see all of the folders I created from which I choose the one named after the Mac I am on and the backup prepares and then it nicely backs up as expected.

So far so good but...and there's always a but...when it comes to backing up the 5,1 itself (I have two other Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 blades and a Samsung 2TB EVO 860 SATA in addition to the 16TB EXOS spinner) when I go to Select the destination from the 5,1 Time Machine preferences I don't see any of the backup folders I created that are visible and accessible from all the other Macs!

Obviously I have missed something fundamental here but I can't think what it might be? Surely if I can see these Time Machine backup folders from all of the other Macs across the network I should be able to see these same folders locally?

Also although I can see all of these same backup folders including another one I have created called HP Spectre X360 from this PC even though I select it as a backup destination it does not seem to stick in the standard Win 10 backup program. I can select the previous network destination on my RackStation and it has been working well over the years but I want to retire this and backup everything to the 5,1

I am guessing that because the drive is formatted MacOS Journaled that although I can see it by name it cannot be read by the PC and so is not a valid destination. Would this be a correct assumption?

And if it is could/should I reformat the 16TB EXOS in a format (exFAT?) that would be compatible with both Mac Time Machine and PC backup formats?

I realise it is a lot of work and I would have to backup every machine once again but if I could format the EXOS exFAT/FAT32 and it would be a reliable format hosted on a Mac for both Mac & PC backups I would do it just to keep my backups in one place!

Thanks & kind regards,
-=Glyn=-

 

[Bigwaff]

So far so good but...and there's always a but...when it comes to backing up the 5,1 itself (I have two other Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 blades and a Samsung 2TB EVO 860 SATA in addition to the 16TB EXOS spinner) when I go to Select the destination from the 5,1 Time Machine preferences I don't see any of the backup folders I created that are visible and accessible from all the other Macs!

You don't mention which 5,1 drive is your boot drive. Your boot drive can't be the Time Machine backup drive for itself.

 

[GlynH]

Appreciate the quick reply.

I can boot from either of the 1TB blades. I have High Sierra on one and Mojave on the other which has become my standard boot drive...no OC trickery.

The 16TB EXOS is purely for backup and the 2TB SSD is completely empty at the moment but had planned to use it for a documents/photos/video/data drive using either of the blades as system drives.

-=Glyn=-

 

[Bigwaff]

And if it is could/should I reformat the 16TB EXOS in a format (exFAT?) that would be compatible with both Mac Time Machine and PC backup formats?

No. Both High Sierra and Mojave only support backing up to HFS+ disks via Time Machine so your 5,1 would not be able to use the disk for backups if it is ExFAT formatted. I've never tried sharing an ExFAT formatted disk from macOS but I recall reading somewhere only HFS/HFS+/APFS disks can be "shared" on macOS. Even if you can share ExFAT disk, you wouldn't want ExFAT to be your backup disk format. ExFAT is not a journaled file system and is known to be easily corrupted and not easily repaired, especially on macOS, where the ExFAT block size as formatted by macOS is a different block size as formatted by Windows.

when I go to Select the destination from the 5,1 Time Machine preferences I don't see any of the backup folders I created that are visible and accessible from all the other Macs!

The visibility of the folders may have to do w/ how folder sharing is set up by Time Machine when you selected to share as a backup destinations. Be interested to see what the permissions are on the folders in "Get Info".