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10.5: Time Machine working with AirPort and AFP disks?
Authored by: blanton on Nov 04, '07 11:15:44PM

Registered: Nov 2, 2007 (Apple Support Forum)

Re: Time Machine
Posted: Nov 4, 2007 10:57 PM in response to: chancorey

Time Machine is working, apparently, with my AEBS, and a Western Digital My Book 500GB USB 2.0 drive. I had previously backed up two Powerbooks to this drive, via USB cable direct connect. I then plugged the drive into the AEBS and was able to get it "seen" by Time Machine.

I'm not entirely sure what is going on now, but I suspect it may have begun the backup, again, from scratch, as it's been 27 hours since the process began last night, and the progress bar is at 37.34 GB out of 89.32 GB. At this rate it will take nearly three days. So far it hasn't missed a beat though. It keeps grinding along. ("Backing up 919,307 items") If it finishes, then I'd expect the incremental backups to go pretty quickly, wouldn't you think?

I'm not going to trust this for a while, though. My main backup strategy will be to take a large HD from computer to computer, doing each in turn. And then, backing up that backup drive. I've got mac stuff since 1984 squirreled away. Pretty much everything since '84.

MBpro(s) Mac OS X (10.5)



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10.5: Time Machine working with AirPort and AFP disks?
Authored by: bradn on Nov 06, '07 03:44:12PM

I have TM network backups working for 3 (retail family pack version) leopard macs on a tiger AFP share. Most of the tricks described in this hint did *not* work for me.

After lots of trial and error here are my observations (YMMV of course, but I hope this helps folks out there). Note I have not tested against a leopard shared disk, SMB share or AEBS. I backup using 802.11g for 2 laptops and wired ethernet for an iMac. My server's a G4 Mac Mini so I'm limited to 100mb ethernet.

1) only erase and install machines worked. repeated errors on a tiger upgrsded machine. cool thing is I did a reinstall using erase and install on the 3rd machine after doing an upgrade and a full TM backup. I used that backup during the erase and install to recover all the user data apps etc - something to think about when upgrading.

2) my network drive never showed up as an available disk in TM. they still don't even though TM works fine. no amount of copying .00[mac] and .com.apple.time* files helped in this regard.

3) the only way I got it to work on each machine was to locally attach the drive, do a full TM backup, then reconnect to the drive once it's back as a network share. At that point TM worked but repeated to do a full system backup, this time using a sparseimage file. from then on everything was cool.

4) When I tried to delete the backups.backupdb directory using my tiger server the unused diskspace was *NOT* recovered (i.e. the available space reported by finder and disk utility did not show the recovered space of the removed backups directory. The only way to recover the space was to reconnect the network drive directly to a leopard machine with TM disabled, delete the directory, then holding down the option key empty trash.

5) Each client needs to connect to the share. setting up an auto-connect at login takes care of this automatically

6) I still need to mount the sparseimage file manually to do a restore.

Again ymmv, but I'm looking at 3 machines backing up to a tiger afp shared network drive right now and everything's been running great. Hope this helps others that may have been frustrated up to now.



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