As a reader pointed out, there is an easy way to enable Time Machine on non-supported drives.
The trick is to execute the command: “defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1″ in a terminal.
Before executing:
After executing:
As you can see, you can now select a network drive to use as Time Machine backup. The “alouca” drive is a samba mount, on a Linux box.
If you select a network drive, Time machine creates a sparse image on that drive, mounts it, and it begins to backup there. Quite smart eh?
January 17th, 2008 at 12:15 am
[...] file and have a network connected (strong encrypted if you like), HFS+ journalled drive. After the Timemachine network trick, you’re good to go at no cost at all. The only difference is that you can’t connect [...]
January 21st, 2008 at 9:58 pm
It really pisses me off that they constantly disable features or you don’t know they exist until someone tells you and you have to go to the shell and type in some stuff.
How convenient is that?
Thanks a lot for the post, though.
January 21st, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Yea I’ll agree with you.
The thing is that the functionality is there, working great, but they disable it until they release “some great product”, in this particular case, time capsule, and they force you to pay for something like that.
Even if they have some great products, this behavior pisses me off!
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Maybe, just maybe in their testing they realized that given the number of possible network configurations possible, they couldn’t guarantee a product that “just worked?” Instead they make it easy for advanced users to turn it on without getting the “I tried that and it sucked” word of mouth not to mention support calls.
Just a thought.
Thanks for this post too!
February 5th, 2008 at 2:44 am
[...] shares. Well, actually it does, it’s just an undocumented feature, and like it says on this blog you have to type the following into a terminal defaults write com.apple.systempreferences [...]
March 25th, 2008 at 6:45 am
Needing an online Time Machine Backup, I created one out of spare parts and a 500 GB drive, using Ubuntu and Netatalk/AFP. So far, it works great. I documented it at http://www.myhovercraftisfullofeels.com/creating-an-online-time-machine-backup/
Hope it helps people!
stony
February 17th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Having worked in apple technical support, I can very easily see why this functionality is disabled by default. Apple doesn’t want people calling in requesting support on how to set up an NFS mount or whatever, and then have people complain that their time machine backups ‘broke’ because they reinstalled windows on the target machine.
When the average user is confused by a mouse with two buttons (and no, I am not joking about that), life is easier for all concerned if you simply say ‘you have to buy an external hard drive or time capsule’.
April 8th, 2009 at 9:49 am
worked in a second! thanks a lot. I suppose I can now use a network drive residing on a box running windows home server as my backup drive? i wonder why Mac hides the ability to do so…..
December 31st, 2009 at 5:34 am
Great post I actually didn’t know that! Its good to see you updating this even during these tough economic times.
Sarah,
Watch Daybreakers Online site admin, fellow blogger.