I finally got the single-bay, 1TB NAS:
It took a few hours to "make" OS X TimeMachine to accept the NAS and perform backups - the steps below will outline what is necessary.
The installation was straight forward, but you should consider a number of steps:
Follow up:
- To be absolutely sure, prepare/initialise your new hard-drive first. As I do not have a PC, I had to get a eSata (Vantec NexStar 3) enclosure, so that I could hook up the harddrive to my MacBook Air. Once the drive is connected via USB, OS X will prompt to initialise the drive and the preparation is complete.
- After fitting the drive back into the DS107+ case, power up the device and follow the setup-assistant. I assigned a static IP-address and named the NAS MuffinStation (well, my laptop is called MacMuffin - so there)
- Disable Time Machine in your System Preferences
- Open up a terminal session and enable NAS support for Time Machine:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 - Time Machine saves backups in a very specific format, and we will use a sparsebundle to get this done. The sparsebundle name consists of
your computer name_mac address.sparsebundle. In my case the sparsebundle is namedMagicDudeAir_001ec4b8f9b3.sparsebundle - Find the MAC address of the machine’s internal Ethernet port with
ifconfig en0 | grep ether | sed s/://g | sed s/ether//in Terminal. This will return one line of output, which is the MAC address for the Ethernet port, which will be a string of letters and numbers, for example, 00:1e:c4:b8:f9:b3. Even if the network backups will be done using a different port (e.g. AirPort: usually en1), the system will use the MAC address of en0 as part of the system identifier. Make a new “sparsebundle” on a local disk (NOT the Time Machine disk!). This sparsebundle is a virtual filesystem image which we’ll copy to the NAS, and Time Machine will then access it remotely (that way Time Machine’s not limited by the filesystem features of whatever NAS it’s using: all the funky stuff happens within the sparsebundle). By default sparsebundles can keep growing until they fill up the NAS, but in this scenario we keep other things on the NAS as well as backups, and we’re going to limit the sparsebundle size to 70 GB.
I could torture you now through Disk Utility, but there is an easier way via the command line:
sudo hdiutil create -size 70g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -nospotlight -volname "Backup of Gerd's MacBook Air" -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" -verbose ./MagicDudeAir_001ec4b8f9b3.sparsebundle. This will create a 70GB sparse-bundle as a case-sensitive, journaled HFS+ without spotlight indexing.Log into your Synology Disk-Station and create a Shared Folder. I named mine "TimeMachine":
(Don't make the Shared folder hidden yet)
Create a user - I named mine "TimeMachine" and give the user R+W privileges. I also assigned my user a quota of 80GB (since this is the maximum hard-drive size on my MacBook Air):
- Optional: In another post I will show you how the Synology can broadcast your services via Bonjour, so that they immediately appear in the Finder. This is cool, since you do not have to mount your shares, but requires that your iTunes server is running on the disk-station.
- In Finder, select Go>Connect to Server. For the server address, type smb://timemachine@ip-address-of-nas/timemachine. Click Connect and when prompted, enter the password and save in your keychain. It is important that you give your NAS a static IP, or use the Bonjour tip instead. Although some people prefer to mount via AFP, I chose SMB instead. I initially tried AFP and during the backup noticed the errors "
Jul 15 12:37:09 afpd[7471]: bad function 4F" being logged on the DS107+. This did not give me a high level of comfort. There seems to be no speed difference either. Through the wireless-network (G/N) I get about 6MB/sec throughput. I did find however that changing from TKIP to AES wireless-security seems to have improved the speed by 20% - Now copy your locally created sparsebundle into the timemachine share.
Go back to the DS107+ diskstation and verify that your quota usage has increased. My empty sparsebundle used up initially 80MB, the screenshot below shows you the quota usage:
(if your quota is still at 0, then you have logged in with the incorrect user or did not follow the instructions properly)
Almost there: Open up TimeMachine, select your "timemachine"-folder and the backup will start:
- For the first backup it is recommended to connect via LAN, as you will be able to get a throughput of 10-30MB/sec.
- Go back into DiskStation and hide the Shared Folder "timemachine"
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The only "problem" I ran into, was the mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters in the name of the share and the user on the DS. I kept getting "unable to mount volume" messages, but once I changed both the sharename and username to lowercase only, everything worked perfectly. I'm not sure if the characters were acually the show-stoppers, but at least it seemed to be.
The initial backup took about 3 to 4 hours on a wireless connection. I'm now awaiting the second backup to see if everthing keeps working. Keep your fingers crossed ;-)
Best regards,
The steps you described here are absolutely suitable for
DS207+.
P.S.
To enable the support of network disks in Time Machine
I used the following application:
http://antonellomigliorelli.googlepages.com/tm
Thanks!
ifconfig en0 | grep ether | sed s/://g | sed s/ether//
Also, be clear about how to get the machine's name - `hostname` might return a fully qualified name different to the machine's own name.
(Please let me know the answer to that last point!!)
networksetup -getcomputername
Thanks to http://lists.apple.com/archives/macos-x-server/2004/Oct/msg00879.html
However, http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1760 says you have to take out certain characters from your computer name, including ' - this being a default...
- do you have to repeat this for every account on the macbook?
- can you still have normal activities (shared folders etc.) using your regular user name?
PS. I am also trying to get NFS wowrking on the Synology, could timemachine also work with NFS?
However: after sleep/standby or when logging out all users while a backup is in progress the backup fails and TM will not be able to connect to the backup volume anymore, a reboot is necessary
Is there a workaround this?
"The backup disk image could not be mounted."
and I am curious about (.10) autom-ounting? Probably my error is resolved than as well?
Peter.
My problem: after my first few backups, it fails stating "The backup disk image could not be mounted." I am able to access the volume without problems in the finder.
Any ideas?
I too am getting the "unable to mount disk error" but I actually want to use an external USB hard disk connected to the synology as my Time Machine backup.
The synology sees the disk and automatically names it "usbshare1", and I can access it via Finder however my probelm is that you can't seem to assign user quotas to external disks.
Can this be done?
Thanks again!
Can this be done?
I can also read and restore from this backup, however, subsequent incremental backups (over WLAN) don't seem to work and I get the "cannot mount disk image" error.
Could it be the MAC identifier i he file name being from en0 and i am trying to backup via en1???
Thanks for a very detailed instruction. I am new at mac - just ordered my new macbook.
I am going to use af NAS to backup with time machine.
I have one question regarding point 7 where you make the virtuale sparsebundle at 70 GB.
I was wondering, will this step you mention make a sparesfile of 70 GB from the right beginning? and there by taking up 70 GB of space on the NAS-server? Or should i understand this step as that the sparsebundle will keep growing but only up to 70 GB?
I am not interested in allocating 70 GB of NAS-space from the beginning, but willing to accept that it can use up to 70 GB as the file-folders i backup becomes bigger and bigger...
anyone that can help me with this issue?
samir
I´m stuck in nº12.
If I have to copy the .sparsebundle file ... where is it? How can I can copy it into the timemachine shared?
Thanks
Is the spasebundle a file? Where is located on my Mac to select it and then copy onto the share?
Thanks
I have one more question:
I modified the script to create a 250Gb sparsebundle, but have reconsidered and would like to allocate 400Gb of space to the TimeMachine backup.
Is it possible to change the size of the sparsebundle once you have started using it to backup to?
I have all my backups since I started using the NAS on the drive and can't start all over again.
Once again, thanks for your help on this.
I am having difficulties. if i leave the NAS, for go to work with my macbook and return, then TM will not connect to server.. or if it find it, then it return like that it could not open the folder.. what to do?
samir