Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS

Nice.
But, I would still be quite careful. I had no problems for months, too.
You ought to back up those images or have alternative restore options. I am describing well known issues with these sparsebundles and not shortcoming of the NAS or the method used to setup this method of backup-- except of course for one issue: if an image does get corrupted, you will have 2 copies of it if you use raid. Great.

The fact that a single bad-bit will kill the image, and that there is no commercial recovery software that can handle the large catalogues in these images should be enough to give folks heed; keep other backups. I do, so these issues are not a huge deal for me, but rather just a big time waste. Letting people know that "it worked for me, so its a good solution" is like me saying "I've never had a hard drive fail on any of my more the a dozen macs (true), so why do I need backup". There is nothing wrong with the simple recipes posted here that describe how to use the NAS with TM; the problem is with the brittleness of the sparseimage technology and the uselessness of raid here... and the fact that you (likely) don't know an image has been corrupted until the next time a backup is attempted

Do we still need to do this with the Pro and also this utility? http://www.xiotios.com/itimemachine.html

We can't get time machine backups to work using a pro share and this utility. We'd like to avoid all that sparsebundle junk if we have to...

Thanks!!

BobRoss wrote:
Do we still need to do this with the Pro and also this utility? http://www.xiotios.com/itimemachine.html We can't get time machine backups to work using a pro share and this utility. We'd like to avoid all that sparsebundle junk if we have to... Thanks!!

It looks like this utility just puts a GUI on the instructions here. It changes the Mac to allow network backups and helps locate the sparsebundle on the network share.

Here is a link that that shows the basic usage of the Time Machine option on the Pro.

http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=756

Currently this is only available on the Pro but will be made available for the NV+, 1100, Duo, etc soon.

Is that multi or single user? We have 4 Macs we'd like to use for this...

Thanks!!!

BobRoss wrote:
Is that multi or single user? We have 4 Macs we'd like to use for this... Thanks!!!

It should work for multiple users. The one thing you need to think about however is the space you are going to start out with because if you want to change it latter or the amount of clients you will have connected. When you try it out please let me know how it goes for you. This way we can get in important changes before final, thanks.

HUGELY important note that needs to be added to the Time Machine instructions - disable any antivirus scanner. I have Sophos Antivirus installed, and was seeing throughput of .1 MB every 10 minutes (no exaggeration) after only a few minutes of backup, such that after 5 hours of backup, I had only 173.1 MB backed up of 35 GB. I disabled Sophos, and right now am averaging 100 MB every few seconds, so the difference could be an order of magnitude. I got the idea from this link:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=379066

For those wondering why I am running antivirus, this is a machine owned by my employer, a state university, and they require it. I do understand that the idea of "Mac virus" is somewhat laughable right now :).

Please add this ASAP, it would have saved me lots on medical bills for the ulcer I developed trying to figure this out.

Thanks,
Greg

P.S. in the time it took me to write this, I went from about about 200 MB to 3.3 GB backed up. This is more like it.

GregBeaver wrote:

HUGELY important note that needs to be added to the Time Machine instructions - disable any antivirus scanner. I have Sophos Antivirus installed, and was seeing throughput of .1 MB every 10 minutes (no exaggeration) after only a few minutes of backup, such that after 5 hours of backup, I had only 173.1 MB backed up of 35 GB. I disabled Sophos, and right now am averaging 100 MB every few seconds, so the difference could be an order of magnitude. I got the idea from this link: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=379066 For those wondering why I am running antivirus, this is a machine owned by my employer, a state university, and they require it. I do understand that the idea of "Mac virus" is somewhat laughable right now :). Please add this ASAP, it would have saved me lots on medical bills for the ulcer I developed trying to figure this out. Thanks, Greg P.S. in the time it took me to write this, I went from about about 200 MB to 3.3 GB backed up. This is more like it.

Thanks for the info Greg! I will pass on this info for you.

Updated to Mac OS X 10.5.6 last night. When Time Machine started, it took a looooooong time in the "Preparing for the backup" state. I thought I lost my TM sparsebundle access again and almost cancelled the backup. However, I decided to let it do its thing. It was at least 30-45 minutes before Time Machine started showing progress in actually backing up. The backup size was 1.5 GB right after the upgrade to 10.5.6. So, the good news is that the update to 10.5.6 did not break the sparsebundle on the ReadyNAS.

I had downloaded the 10.5.6 updatefrom the Apple web site -- I used the 668 MB Combo Update instead of letting the Software Update uitility pull the update from Apple automatically. Last night a lot of people posted problems with updating to 10.5.6 via the Software Update utility, but downloading the Combo update from the Apple web site seemed to have worked flawlessly for most everyone. Also, if you have more than one Mac in the household, you can download the Combo update to a ReadyNAS share and launch it from there. I did exactly that from two of my Macs (aluminum Macbook and 1st-generation Macbook Air), and it worked fine. However, I did not do this in parallel, so I would suggest doing this on one Mac at a time.

Hello all,

I use a ReadyNAS (RAIDiator 4.1.4 [1.00a042]) and my Macs are runnig Leopard 10.5.6. I would like to run Time Machine using the NAS... Following, the tricks given on TimeMachine page, I succeded in creating a sparsebundle on a dedicated partition on the ReadyNAS... all was fine.

The problem occured when starting TimeMachine : I experienced a strange error message : Time Machine gave me an error window saying : "Unable to create the file "/var/db/.TimeMachine.cookie" ! ! :?

The name of my Machine is "Hutte" and my account name is "Panoramix". You can see here the details on the screenshot I took to show you the problem . Any help would be appreciated ;-)

Francois