Apple Time Machine on windows share mount?

[BatKing]

Hi,

I am currently on Merlin 380.57 and backing up 2 macs to a 2TB HD attached to USB 3.0 port. It is working good. I also have a Win Server 2012 R2 which also acting as a file server with lots of space and data protection.

I am wondering if it possible to let the router mount to the Win server's SMB share and backup to here instead of the USB attached HD? and How?

Thanks
Leon

 

[Weaselboy]

Not with OS X Time Machine it won't. Time Machine requires AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) not SMB. There are some hacks/work arounds I have seen to get Time Machine to work over SMB, but they are unreliable and I would not want to trust my backups to them.

 

[sfx2000]

TimeMachine is always going to be spotty, and while Apple supports direct attached disks, along with OS X Server App and TimeCapsule, no guarantee that'll work in the long term with any third party solution...

Might work in the short term, but in my experience, things tend to go bad after a month or so when TimeMachine starts to coalesce daily/hourly images...

 

[BatKing]

What I meant was still using ASUS router as TimeCapsule, but the storage is a network mount on the Win 2012 Server R2 shared storage instead of a USB attached HD to the ASUS router. In the ASUS router UI for TimeMachine, it ask me to select a path to a mount point which just to my USB HD. So I thought it might be possible to mount a network folder on the Router itself then select that path for the Timemachine backup in the ASUS admin UI?

 

[Weaselboy]

What I meant was still using ASUS router as TimeCapsule, but the storage is a network mount on the Win 2012 Server R2 shared storage instead of a USB attached HD to the ASUS router. In the ASUS router UI for TimeMachine, it ask me to select a path to a mount point which just to my USB HD. So I thought it might be possible to mount a network folder on the Router itself then select that path for the Timemachine backup in the ASUS admin UI?

You still have the same issue. For that to work, you would need to have AFP support on the Windows machine where you are mounting the drive.

 

[sfx2000]

What I meant was still using ASUS router as TimeCapsule, but the storage is a network mount on the Win 2012 Server R2 shared storage instead of a USB attached HD to the ASUS router. In the ASUS router UI for TimeMachine, it ask me to select a path to a mount point which just to my USB HD. So I thought it might be possible to mount a network folder on the Router itself then select that path for the Timemachine backup in the ASUS admin UI?

There's a couple of ways to do it, but I wouldn't recommend it...

 

[BatKing]

There's a couple of ways to do it, but I wouldn't recommend it...

Can you explain why? I thought in this case the protocol still AFP through the ASUS router? using a USB Disk is fine but just no data protection against the USB Disk failure.

 

[sfx2000]

Can you explain why? I thought in this case the protocol still AFP through the ASUS router? using a USB Disk is fine but just no data protection against the USB Disk failure.

TimeMachine works on Apple's concept of file containers - SparseBundles - HFS+ can mount/read/write, but TimeMachine takes it a bit further with metadata within the bundle...

Going forward - TimeMachine works best on direct attached storage (USB/Firewire/Thunderbolt) as the time deltas for the symlinks and new files all sync up to a TimeMachine "image" - OS X server.app does a decent job of this outside of direct attached devices, but even then, there's the time delta between the client/server, and TimeCapsule is the next best choice...

Even then - things can blow up and render a backup bundle null and void...

Third parties - it'll work for a bit, but over time, the time errors add up... that's the issue I ran into with QNAP's TimeMachine support - worked great until TimeMachine started rolling up delta images and thinning the bundle - and the TimeMachine client ran off the end of the pier- QNAP is EXT4 based, and emulates AFP, and does a reasonable job of it compared to many...

The real challenge with third party support for TimeMachine is not the initial backup, but when TimeMachine starts thinning/coalescing the changes over time...

 

[Weaselboy]

Can you explain why? I thought in this case the protocol still AFP through the ASUS router? using a USB Disk is fine but just no data protection against the USB Disk failure.

The issue here is Time Machine needs AFP to work properly, and in your scenario with a SMB mount on Windows you would not be using AFP.

 

[sfx2000]

The issue here is Time Machine needs AFP to work properly, and in your scenario with a SMB mount on Windows you would not be using AFP.

AFP, and a proper version of AFP - many Routers/NAS boxes might not have the right version there.

 

[BatKing]

But before I using ASUS router as Time Capsule, I was running colinux in Windows Home Server V1 with the only purpose is serving AFP to local NTFS file system. I was about to go DDWRT with optware to install AFP on my old router, but then someone came up with this colinux solution which use very little resource. I was running it from 2011 until 2 months ago and it was fine. I did get the famous "Time Machine has to start a new backup" once in a while. But base on my research, even Apple's TimeCapsule can have that if backup over WiFi and that's what I do. A script with diskutils can always fix it. I have never need to really restart a new backup and lost all the history. Since I converted to 128MB band file size sparebundle, I never get the "start a new backup" error anymore. Colinux do not have a 64 bit version so I can't install it on my win 2012 server. running a real VM is too resource consuming for my low end server.