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25 comments

  1. § Luc Van Bogaert Email said on :
    Thank you for this very helpful article. I've gotten TM to work now with my Synology DS107+.

    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,
  2. § Harald Striepe Email said on :
    If you want to keep extra history for "Oh, durn, I should not have deleted that file last month!", add more disk space to the bundle to prevent purging of older data.
  3. § Dan Email said on :
    Thank you for your help and for all the great articles Mac and Synology 107+!

  4. § ophtha Email said on :
    Thank you for your wonderful information! I have a question. As you know, when I re-install OSX in a new HDD, I can import previous settings and apps form time machine during install-procedure. In order to use that function with NAS, I should access time machine in NAS during install-procedure. How can I do that? How can I use terminal session during intall-procedure? What should I type in terminal session?
  5. § Sergey Astakhov Email said on :
    Thank You very much for such a useful howto!
    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

  6. § Matt Email said on :
    I just picked up a new macbook today, and didn't want to shell out the $400 for a time capsule as I already have 250 gigs on a Linksys NSLU2 NAS Server, hacked up with some linux firmware. I did the identical steps as you did to setup the NAS, and right now I have my Macbook backing up to the western digital drive on the Linksys slug.

    Thanks!
  7. § Martin Cleaver Email said on :
    You might want to use this to get the machine's mac address in the right format.

    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!!)
  8. § Martin Cleaver Email said on :
    Answer to my own question:

    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...

  9. § Maurits Email said on :
    Fantastic thank you! I am just wondering two things:
    - 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?
  10. § Maurits Email said on :
    It works! I have a 207+
    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?
  11. § P3t3r Email said on :
    ...indeed GREAT tutorial, but I get the same error-message as Doug (posting 11.)

    "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.
  12. § Doug Email said on :
    Great tutorial, thanks a lot. I had to rename my computer in System Preferences/Sharing to get it to work. One thing that isn't clear in the tutorial is that the sparsebundle can be deleted once it's copied over to the NAS.

    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?
  13. § gnaschenweng® Email said on :
    @marc - this is a valid point. In my case I always connect via one interface (i.e. wireless which is en0). I have not tried to connect via a wired-link.
  14. § Marc Email said on :
    Great tutorial.

    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?
  15. § Marc Email said on :
    I too am running 10.5.5 and the first backup (connected via ethernet) worked fine.

    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???
  16. § gnaschenweng® Email said on :
    I have not received any of those errors. I am running on 10.5.5 - not sure if this has anything to do with it? I had one case, where the sparsebundle seem to have been corrupted (that was related to before a fix in 10.5.4 where TimeMachine did not expunge expired backup-sets --- after applying 10.5.4 I have been running fine)
  17. § Samir Email said on :
    Hi,

    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
  18. § gnaschenweng® Email said on :
    @samir - it will not allocate a 70GB sparsebundle upfront and the sparsebundle will grow to 70GB. It will limit the sparsebundles size to a max of 70GB and TimeMachine will purge older backups to make enough space to place newer backups into the sparsebundle.
  19. § pg Email said on :
    Hi, Your article is great.
    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
  20. § gnaschenweng® Email said on :
    @pg - you mount the share first: smb://timemachine@ip-address-of-nas/timemachine (as in 11.) then you copy the sparsebundle onto the share
  21. § pg Email said on :
    Thanks for the fast response ... but what I don´t know how to do it is "copy the sparsebundle onto the share"
    Is the spasebundle a file? Where is located on my Mac to select it and then copy onto the share?
    Thanks
  22. § gnaschenweng® Email said on :
    @pg - the sparsebundle is created in step 7. you just take that file and copy it to your share. The sparsebundle is created wherever your current directory is (when you open a terminal session)
  23. § Marc Email said on :
    Thanks for all your help, it works perfectly!

    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.
  24. § Samir Email said on :
    finally i got my macbook, my first one :-) and as NAS from DS 207+

    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
  25. § Addy said on :
    Dude, I just followed your instructions and the backup is running as I'm typing this! You Rock!! Hope it keeps on working, but for now... life is great and cheaper.. Next time you're in the netherlands, I'll buy you a beer!

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