Will Leopard’s Time Machine backup to a network drive?
I caught the very long and very informative Guided Tour of Leopard last night. Hey, what’s a geek to do when there’s no good television programming on and you’ve burned through all the recorded eps of Star Trek: Enterprise? It’s not like we could watch BSG since we have to wait another month yet! Wait, where was I. Oh yes, the Leopard tour…
One of the features I’m most interested in is the Time Machine backup functionality. I could care less about the pretty UI, it’s the requirement for an external drive that has me wondering. It makes perfect sense to have your data backed up to an external drive. After all: if your Mac’s internal drive fails, gets corrupt or just decides to have fun at your data’s expense, you’ll want your precious info somewhere else for the restore. When you plug in an external drive to a Leopard system, it asks if you want to use that drive for Time Machine. Very nice and very similar to how Vista asks if you want to use a flash or external drive for ReadyBoost. My question is: does that drive HAVE to be a physically connected external drive or can I use the 320 GB USB drive I hang off of my Apple AirPort Extreme router? Even more interesting: could you remotely backup and restore to a network drive at home while on the road? Seems like it should work, but I haven’t found the answer just yet…
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I know the answer to the first question is yes. Jobs has mentioned before that a drive can be hung off the USB on an Airport Extreme and used to back up “all of the Macs in your house” using Time Machine.
I saw, but cannot remember where, that Time Machine works [test proven] on external and network drives as well as another partition, so it will probably also work on another internal drive. Seems similar to targeting another drive when using ‘Restore’ in the Disk Utility.
It looks like this feature have changed recently:
http://macenstein.com/default/archives/875
It states that the drive will have to be connected by FireWire or USB now.
I could be wrong… but as far as I know, the drive must be Mac format. And these ethernet/network/imbedded server (or whatever you call these things) drives are PC format.
Need an XRAID?
Sadly the biggest thing on my mind after this article is…
FRIGGEN SCIFI CHANNEL!!! Why have they ruined Friday nights with Odyssey 5 and Flash Gordon?! Why have they forsaken their cash cows of Stargate and Battlestar!? Their Friday nights rocked until they moved BSG off the Friday night lineup, and now that SG-1 is canceled, it leaves Atlantis on its own with two of the most craptacular shows I’ve ever seen.
Even with SG-1 canceled, they should be re-running Season 3 of BSG and Dr. Who alongside Atlantis while they ramp up to the premiere of Razor! Damn you, Sci-Fi Channel!
From the apple.com site (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html):
Pick a disk. Any disk.
You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.
So it looks like a remote machine with afp support should work too…
What about to a linux box? I have an old PC that I was thinking of setting up as a backup server (I would be nice to plop down in my normal spot on the couch and have backups automatically run to my server in the bedroom…) I haven’t checked in awhile, but can Linux mount hfs+ partitions?
Just installed Leopard. I cannot set this to work on an AFP mounted HFS+ drive. VERY disappointed by this. If it is restricted to USB & FW direct connected drives, the usefulness drops significantly.
Doh! The network drive has to be hosted from a machine running leopard or leopard server. Just have to upgrade the other system.
use globalsan iscsi and mount an iscsi disk using openfiler or other free iscsi target software. Works great!