Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS

sphardy wrote:
It stays bloated - this I can confirm from practical experience

I figured that it would based on your description I just wanted to make sure, since 4.1.5 beta makes time machine work the "normal" way for a network backup does it have the same issue with the sparse bundle size getting bloated? Or does it just reflect the files inside of it?

dtambre wrote:
sphardy wrote: It stays bloated - this I can confirm from practical experience I figured that it would based on your description I just wanted to make sure, since 4.1.5 beta makes time machine work the "normal" way for a network backup does it have the same issue with the sparse bundle size getting bloated? Or does it just reflect the files inside of it?

4.1.5 just automates the process - the same sparsebundles are created.

Rob

dtambre wrote:
In theory (ie I don't knwo of anyone who has tested this) the sparsebundle will only be restricted by the available space on your NAS - I'm not aware of any size limitations of sparsebundles.

I think the sparsebundle can also be limited by the size you attribute when creating it. An easy way to expand the sparsebundle is to mount the TM share, then drag the SP onto disk utility. From there you can fix it and / or expand it.

rupert1020 wrote:

dtambre wrote: In theory (ie I don't knwo of anyone who has tested this) the sparsebundle will only be restricted by the available space on your NAS - I'm not aware of any size limitations of sparsebundles. I think the sparsebundle can also be limited by the size you attribute when creating it. An easy way to expand the sparsebundle is to mount the TM share, then drag the SP onto disk utility. From there you can fix it and / or expand it.

Do you have a step by step guide of how to do this and any experience of it working?

I have two MBP. In the past I manually created 2 sparsebundles, one for each MBP for Time Machine. Now that I use the new utility in the new Radiator, there doesn't seems to be a way to differentiate the TM in two separate shares?

georgelee wrote:
I have two MBP. In the past I manually created 2 sparsebundles, one for each MBP for Time Machine. Now that I use the new utility in the new Radiator, there doesn't seems to be a way to differentiate the TM in two separate shares?

Even when manually creating sparsebundles there has never been a need for more than one share. The sparsebundles are differentiated by the machine identification, usu MAC address.

so if I want to use the ReadyNAS utility to setup TM for two MBP's. How do I do it. I set one up successfully, the second one says TM error, not enough space... Thanks.

I had previously gone through the manual process of creating the sparsebundle and all the Terminal jiggery pokery that went with it, which was working fine until I updated RAIDiator to 4.1.5 to fix a problem with PS3 uPnP, now my MacBook cannot connect to the Time Machine backup I created. I noticed Time Machine listed in the Backup section of the ReadyNAS menus so decided to set that up, it looks to be creating a new backup from scratch.

My questions are - what happened to the old sparsebundle that I created? If it's no longer in use (I do not need it as a backup if the new one works) then can I safely delete it?

On my Backup share there is a sparsebundle folder with a date stamp of 21st March, probably the last time I ran Time Machine (meh, I'm lazy. It's not critical data anyway, just a laptop I use now and then). Could this be my old sparsebundle? I cannot see anything else on the Backup share when using the Finder.

Bonus question: is there any way to safely integrate this old Time Machine data with the new one?

Thanks!

How would I go about restoring files from a Time Machine backup stored on the ReadyNAS to a Mac different than the one from which the backup was made. For example, if my Mac has died and Apple replaced it with a new machine. How would I get the new Mac to see the old Mac's backup on the ReadyNAS?

Hi Sergey,

Did you see this document? Not sure if it works when you're restoring to a different machine, though.

http://www.readynas.com/?p=1730

EDIT: this thread seems to indicate that it will work and that there are additional ways to mount the backup and restore just the data using the migration assistant:

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/363 ... -computer/

-Dave