A Collosus of Genius

I do not own a Time Capsule, I do not plan to get one, nor do i want to connect a usb disk every time i feel like making a backup of my stuff. What i do have however is a wireless network and a Windows 7 PC. Why not use the available disk space in my PC for the backups of my Macbook Pro? I found out how to Time Machine Backup to a Network Drive…

In Snow Leopard it was still possible with a few tweaks and manual image file creation to get the OS to actually backup over the Network onto a Windows NTFS disk. Hoozah! In Lion (MacOSX 10.7.2) there is even another step required to get the backup process running. Using just step 1 it will fail with the message ‘The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features’.

1. So besides the same steps as in Snow Leopard to prepare the Backup Image File (my previous post) you will also need to…

2. Download and run the script from this file to modify backupd in such a way that it accepts remote disk on the network share: backupd_anyafp_r2 – just unpack and run ./install.sh from the terminal.

Thanks to msft.guy for the script!

PS: I still get the feeling that the backup of a FileVault encrypted home directory even on Lion still doesn’t work while being logged in. Meh.

Correction: I had to switch to FileVault2. Now the whole disk is encrypted and my guess is Time Machine can handle that…

What if I still can’t find my share in TimeMachine?
(added 24. Jan. 2013)

Here is a checklist what I would try then:

1. close the preferences or even reboot after running the script above.
2. Find out your Computer Name:
   1. Go to Apple menu > System Preferences and click Sharing.
   2. Note the computer name appearing at the top of the window.
      – For example “ZergasMacbook”.
3. Find your MAC address:
   1. In Apple menu, select System Preferences...
   2. From the View menu in System Preferences, select Network.
   3. In the left column of the Network preference window that opens, click the name of your connection ( Ethernet or Built-in Ethernet).
   4. Click the Advanced... button, and in the dropdown, click the Hardware or Ethernet tab.
   5. The address is the string of letters and numbers next to “MAC Address:” or “Ethernet ID:”.
      – For example “00:15:20:aa:fe:a1”.
4. Create your sparsebundle:
   1. Follow the steps described in my guide: Create a sparsebundle on your Mac manually with the name “ComputerName_MACaddressWithoutColons.sparsebundle” and move it into the shared folder on the windows machine.
      – In the case of the examples above it would be “ZergasMacbook_001520aafea1.sparsebundle”.
5. Connect to the share:
   1. On your Mac, in Finder go to the menu Go -> Connect to Server…
   2. Choose the share with the sparsebundle in it on your Windows computer. The share will now be mounted under Volumes with the name of the share folder you gave in windows.
      – For example let’s call the directory “MacBackup” on the computer “WindowsPC” then you a folder on your Mac called “/Volumes/MacBackup”.
6. Mount the sparsebundle:
   1. Open a terminal and mount the sparsebundle as a drive under /Volumes on your mac by typing: hdiutil attach -verbose /Volumes/MacBackup/ZergasMacbook_001520aafea1.sparsebundle
      You can also just double-click on it to mount (thanks, mike!).
7. Connect the sparsebundle:
   1. Now add the sparsebundle as the Time Machine destination with the terminal by typing: sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/mounted_sparse_bundle
8. Then try starting the preferences and go to TimeMachine looking for the sparsebundle again.

BTW: In the terminal you can hit TAB and OSX will complete the name of a file or folder you were about to write. Like this you dont have to type all the sparsebundle file name.

Good luck!

My provider (Cablecom) is the most crappiest experience i ever had using internet and i have tried AOL 30 days in the 90s… Ok, they sell you 100Mbit by now, and maybe you might get that kind of speed between 4am and 6am but the latency is making the connection useless 22 hours per day: playing games, VoIP calls and streaming videos is absolutely impossible especially during rush hours (from 17h00 to 1h00). And lets be honest, what else do you need the internet for? And when?!

Its not a single occurrence either. This has been going like that since November last year. Sure, it has been ok once in a while, but i feel that every time you actually need the latency-free connection, it starts behaving like THAT:

Normal would be ±12ms to a server of that distance.

And yeah i tried already all kinds of shit: connecting with cable, connecting without router, rebooting, switching cables, using windows, macosx and ubuntu – nothing ever works. And when it comes to asking support about whats going on i just get answers like i should send them a speedtest log, use their speed-tool for windows to increase my connection’s performance or check my antivirus – well whatever… No i am not downloading on 3 computers from p2p while trying to skype! No, i am not even using a firewall. Just admit that you just sold more bandwidth in my neighborhood than you can provide and lets finally upgrade the connection accordingly or at least downgrade all of our speeds to a decent degree so everyone can enjoy their crappy connection without latency. 100Mbit my ass! I need responsiveness!! Dammit!

This evening i was trying out how to use Time Machine on my Mac. Unfortunately I am kind of short on external harddrives at the moment. Here is the full list of steps i did to make my Mac surrender and actually backup over the network onto my windows network share…

1. Create a read/write windows network share on the target system.
2. Mount the network share in your mac.
3. Open a terminal in mac and enter “defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1” – this makes Time Machine accept non-local, non-HFS drives…
4. Open Time Machine and voila: you see the network share.
5. Select the network share and wait for the backup process to start. Observe the network share and copy the filename which is created by Time Machine, since we want to create this file for it. The process will end with an error. I found out that Time Machine is unable to create the so-called sparsebundle file.
6. Open “Disk Utility” on the Mac and create a new image.
7. Save your new image with the filename like the one created by Time Machine. The name should be something like “ComputerName_MACAddress.sparsebundle”. ATTENTION: The MACAddress HAS to be the MACAddress of the Ethernet, no matter which interface you use for backup. I was trying the backup over wifi and Time Machine created a file with the wifi MACAddress. For some reason this doesnt work. Its possible to backup over wifi, but use the Ethernet MACAddress in the filename. The volume name however can be whatever you like. Custom volume size must be the last value set.
8. Change partition to “No Partition Map”
9. Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”
10. Set “Custom Volume size” to the maximum you want to use on your remote location. Dont worry, as your Mac doesnt have to have the required space available you can choose whatever is available on your network share.
11. Save the image and move it to the network share.
12. Start the Time Machine process again.