Using Time Machine with a networked drive
Those folks who are using Time Machine know how great it is for backing up everything quickly and easily. However, what if you can’t always have an external drive hooked up to your machine. Or, maybe you want to back up more then one machine to that drive. Time Machine backups live quite nicely next to other backups or files.
Out of the box Time Machine does not allow you to back up to a network drive. It just doesn’t show up when you go to choose a backup disk. You have to run a command in Terminal first to enable this function. On the machine you want to be able to access a network drive open Terminal and enter this command to enable networked drives in Time Machine:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
How to make your local external hard drive accesible to Time Machine
Now that you have your remote machine able to use Time Machine on a network drive how to you network the drive you want to use?
It’s important to know that Time Machine will only work on HFS+, also known as Mac OS Extended, drives. If your drive is formatted FAT or NTFS for use on Windows it won’t work. Also, Time Machine over the network only works for share points shared out using the version of AFP found in Leopard. You can’t share it off an older Tiger machine.
Create a share point for Time Machine
- Open System Preferences and click on “Accounts”
- Click on the lock at the bottom left of the window and enter your admin name and password.
- Now click on the “+” at the bottom right of the window to create a new account. From the drop down at the top of the window select “Sharing only”. This will create an account that can only be used to access share points from the network. If you have that user already in your address book you can select them from that list. Otherwise just enter the desired name and password.
Now that you have an account for your network user to access the Time Machine share point you have to create it.
- Create a folder on your local external drive to share out for backups
- On a Leopard machine open System Preferences > Sharing. Then place a check next to File Sharing if it isn’t already checked.
- Click on the “+” under “Shared Folders” and select the folder on your external drive.
- The folder now shows up under “Shared Folders”. Select it and then click the “+” sign under “Users”. Add the “Sharing only” you created and make sure they have Read and Write permissions. You can delete the other users from that list so that only the remote user can access that share point if you prefer.
Configure Time Machine on the client
Now, go back to the remote machine and connect to that share point.
In the Finder select Go > Connect to Server and either put in the IP address of the machine you want to back up to or browse for it.
Once you’ve connected to the share go to System Preferences > Time Machine and click on the “Choose Backup Drive”. You should see your network share in the list. Select it and you’ll be asked for the login credentials again. Make sure you check the “Save in Keychain” option so you aren’t asked repeatedly.
Now configure Time Machine the way you want and you’re set!
Every time Time Machine runs it will mount that share point, back up to it and then unmount it. One of the security benefits from using Time Machine like this is that all of the files are saved in an encrypted disk image so they are more secure then a regular time machine backup.
webmaster :: Feb.27.2009 :: Management, System :: 7 Comments »
7 Responses to “Using Time Machine with a networked drive”
so i got to the point where i can back up to the networked drive, but every time my macbook goes to sleep i have to remap the drive when it wakes up. any way to fix that?
Thank you Thank you for that terminal command. My NAS drive now shows up in Time Machine. I can’t thank you enough!
Doesn’t work on sshfs mounted volumes 🙁
Really helpful, just what I needed to do. Followup question/situation:
I set the external drive’s sharing preferences so that only the new sharing-only user and administrators could access it. I now want the host machine itself to use the the same drive for its own Time Machine backup. I logged into a non-administrator user, and I was properly prevented from looking at the drive. However, that also meant there wasn’t a way for me to mount the drive as I do on the remote machine. However again, I went into Time Machine in that non-admin user, and the drive appeared as one of the disks I could select, though now with the “plain metal” icon instead of the FireWire icon like the other drives in the daisy chain. I was able to select it for Time Machine use without ever having to enter the sharing-only user’s password.
Is that an error? Have I configured something incorrectly? Or perhaps is it because, once I’d used an admin password to unlock Time Machine system preferences, I now had proper access to that drive, at least for Time Machine purposes, even though I was doing all this while logged into the Mac as a non-admin user?
This is excellent… I found great instructions on the MacRumors site except I could not select the external drive from Time Machine in Mavericks. But a link from the MacRumors site led me here, where I found the trick that makes it work! After a couple hours of working on this, I am backing up Time Machine from my MacBook Air to my Mac Mini’s USB Drive over wireless! Actually there may be two tricks… using AFP instead of SMB, and sharing a folder on the USB drive instead of sharing the drive itself. It’s not clear to me that this wouldn’t work on SMB also, but sharing the folder did the trick on AFP. Thanks!
Follow up thought… maybe a shared folder on the USB drive was required because I already had the Mac mini host back up to it via Time Machine?
Bother… I thought I was backing up but Time Machine fails due to a user name or password error. I guess I’ll break down and spend $20 to get OS X Server to make this work the ‘official’ way.