Successful Time Machine to Ubuntu Backup
Okay, so I just wanted to document here for anyone else, I've successfully got time machine backing up to my network fileserver (running Ubuntu).
Bit of documented setup:
I have a LVM on my Ubuntu box thats formatted as ReiserFS.
I also have Netatalk compiled and installed (with SSL libraries).
Steps:
- Find a USB or Firewire drive, plug it in and format it (I called mine "Zeke Backup"). Alternatively, you could partition your drive.
- Configure Time Machine to use the drive you formatted in step 1. Wait until Time Machine starts the backup and then turn Time Machine off.
- Close System Preferences and Time Machine if you have them open, then mount your network share.
- Open a terminal and copy all the files (including hidden "dot" files) to your fileserver
- Unmount both drives, and change the name of your network drive to be the same as you had named your drive in step one
- Mount your network drive
- Open the time machine preferences pane, and turn time machine "on". It should show how much space you have on your network drive now
- Wait for the backup to start
»
- Login to post comments
I've made these steps work
I've made these steps work via SMB as well. I've been running Time Machine backing up to my Vista box for the past 24 hours or so. You'll know things are working fine if TM creates a .sparsebundle.
Holy crap, TM versions my email! Try loading TM with Mail as the front app. I wonder what else is integrated...
--
Andrew
mail, address book and ilife
mail, address book and ilife (although maybe just ilife '08) should be integrated
the partition resizing in disk util isnt robust enough for me to set of a big enough partition for time machine w/o reformatting something, so im stuck for a while
You actually don't need to
You actually don't need to make a large enough partition to do a full backup. My USB drive has nowhere near the space required. Time machine will still write the required files though, so it'll work to backup to a network.
Dave
----
"The only thing more dangerous than a hardware guy with a code patch is a programmer with a soldering iron."
Yeah, it worked on my 10 gig
Yeah, it worked on my 10 gig external HD but not my 1gig USB key.
--
Andrew
any 'Successful Time Machine
any 'Successful Time Machine Restore' reports yet? :)
I can restore individual
I can restore individual files and so on, but I haven't tried doing the restore via the Boot CD. Even if that doesn't work (does the boot CD have samba/afp support?), I really don't care because I can always restore manually.
Even if the TM application wasn't working, just having the sparseimage is useful as you can always browse the disk manually.
--
Andrew
if spotlight searches your
if spotlight searches your time machine backups, does spotlight distinguish between file versions clearly?
eg. if you have one document being backed up 30 times in one week, does spotlight generate 30 hits?
The files are hard links,
The files are hard links, and I don't think Spotlight is smart enough to only count the first result. I haven't tested it though, as I really didn't like the idea of indexing 60 gigs of data over the network :)
--
Andrew
Open Terminal...
Open Terminal... Type:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Select your network drive in Time Machine.
Dave
----
"The only thing more dangerous than a hardware guy with a code patch is a programmer with a soldering iron."