Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS

My TM quit working a few months ago, I never got it working again. It was actually breaking down every few weeks, so I got tired of it. Since then, we got a few Leopard upgrades, so I wonder if we should put together a new How-To on TM.

One question is about the command

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Does it need to be entered or not?

Another question is, Does TM mount the share on its own or should the share be mounted manually first?

Then, the creation of the backup volume. What bug exactly was introduced there? What needs to be done?

Finally, allocating blocks of 64 MB. Does this really help? What exactly does this do?

Anyone volunteers for writing up a new How-To?

I will be getting a new Mac when Apple releases a new update to its Macbooks or Macbook Pros later this month or in September, and I would like to get TM working again on my Macbook Air. I've been out of it for several months now, so you guys have a better sense of what has changed since we wrote up the first one.

Add me to the list of those who've been successfully using Time Machine to back up to the NAS for quite some time, but have recently had it fail. I now get the error "Time Machine Error - the backup directory could not be created". I don't think size is the issue, because I've got 200 GB used on my hard drive and the sparseimage was 320 GB. My NAS is currently showing 63% of 1.5 TB used, so there's plenty of room there, too.

I've tried deleting the existing sparseimage and creating a new one from the directions here, but I get the same error on the initial backup. I wonder whether some Apple software update has broken this? I was running 10.5.3 when the problem first occurred. I'm now on 10.5.4, which hasn't changed anything. I don't actually recall any updates around the time the error started.

Hi all,

I've been banging my head against this for a while now and could use some help.

I've followed the instructions and essentially:

1. Created the sparceimage.
Using the instructions mentioned, and some other comments, I created this shell script to create the target sparceimage file:

# The maximum size the image can expand to, in gigabytes.
SIZE_G="300"
# This band size makes it allocate 64 meg blocks (131072 * 512 byte sectors = 64m),
# for 16 files per gig of backup. This saves space and helps performance.
BAND_SIZE="131072"

GREP_B="/usr/bin/grep"
HDIUTIL_B="/usr/bin/hdiutil"
IFCONFIG_B="/sbin/ifconfig"
HOSTNAME_B="/bin/hostname"
RSYNC_B="/usr/bin/rsync"
SED_B="/usr/bin/sed"
AWK_B="/usr/bin/awk"
DEFAULTS_B="/usr/bin/defaults"

HOSTNAME=`${HOSTNAME_B} | ${SED_B} -e 's/.local//g'`
echo "Hostname: \"${HOSTNAME}\""

MAC=`${IFCONFIG_B} en0 | ${GREP_B} ether | ${AWK_B} '{print $2}'`
echo "en0 MAC address: \"${MAC}\""

BUNDLE_NAME="${HOSTNAME}_`echo ${MAC} | ${SED_B} -e 's/://g'`.sparsebundle"
echo "Derrived sparsebundle name: \"${BUNDLE_NAME}\""

VOL_NAME="Backup of ${HOSTNAME}"
echo "Derrived volume name: \"${VOL_NAME}\""

${HDIUTIL_B} create -size ${SIZE_G}g -imagekey sparse-band-size=${BAND_SIZE} -type SPARSEBUNDLE -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" -volname "${VOL_NAME}" -nospotlight -verbose "${BUNDLE_NAME}"

which was created as "Aleph_001ec2074404.sparsebundle" since my "Computer Name" appears to be "Aleph" (this value was a little unclear to me as to where it actually comes from) if one looks in the "Sharing" preference pane:



2. Uploaded the empty sparceimage to my user share on my NAS at the root directory.

3. Updated my "defaults" so Time Machine (TM) sees the network volume.
It seems it was necessary for me to update the setting in order for TM to see my NAS mounted network volume (I tried without setting this first and the volume did not show up in TM). So, I executed this on the command line:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

4. Configured Time Machine
I opened the TM preference pane, selected "Choose Backup Disk..." and selected my user share volume.

5. Unmount my user share...
I found I had to unmount my user share before TM tried to perform a backup because it would fail to unmount/remount the volume with backupd as the owner, giving an error block like this in the console:

8/11/08 16:39:37 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] Starting standard backup 
8/11/08 16:39:37 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] Network mountpoint /Volumes/labrown not owned by backupd... remounting 
8/11/08 16:39:38 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] [SnapshotUtilities remountVolumeRef] url could not be resolved via BonJour 
8/11/08 16:39:38 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] Failed to remount network volume. 
8/11/08 16:39:43 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] Backup failed with error: 19 

6. Let Time Machine try to backup
So, either by the 120 second countdown or by manually kicking it off from the TM menu, TM starts to perform a backup and almost immediately throws up an error dialog saying "The backup volume could not be mounted." and spits this out in the console:

8/11/08 16:55:38 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43695] Starting standard backup 
8/11/08 16:55:40 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43695] FSMatchAliasBulk returned -5023 while resolving alias to backup target 
8/11/08 16:55:45 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43695] Backup failed with error: 19 

Stuck
Error -5023 is:

  afpUserNotAuth                = -5023, /* No AFPLogin call has successfully been made for this session */

Which suggests to me that TM was unable to mount my user share volume in order to get access to the sparceimage and proceed. I have tried various Mac keychain tricks and have deleted the password entry for the nas in my keychain, gone through the TM setup again and had it ask me for the username/password, etc. all with the same results. I have mounted the share via the Finder, saved the password in the keychain, tried again, and same error.

Some googling yielded this discussion which mentions error -5023, and perhaps other places in my travels I ran into someone with a similar error trying to backup to a Linux box who suggested that re-compiling his implementation of APF with "the latest version" seemed to fix it. Of course, I can't quite to that, but I have installed the AFP addon before trying all this.

So, is this a known AFP issue on the ReadyNAS NV+, or other ideas?

Thanks,

Levi

gman wrote:
I've done a fair amount of searching but haven't found anything that details the process for restoring from the ReadyNAS when your hard disk dies. As far as I know, the Mac OS disc can't "restore system" from a network drive. Anybody know?

Has anyone figured this out? I set my wife's MacBook to back up to my ReadyNAS Duo a couple of weeks ago, and tested it out successfully by wiping and restoring a few files. Last night her hard drive died. Apple put in a new one, but when I try to restore from Time Machine by booting from the Leopard install CD, it doesn't see the ReadyNAS. I set the computer's name to match what it was before, so it allows me to select the ReadyNAS as a backup source when I'm booted up normally and go to Time Machine preferences. When I'm booted from CD, it sees the hard disk attached to my Airport Base Station that I'd been using to back her up months ago, but in the Select a Backup Source screen, there is no ReadyNAS listed.

How do I overcome this? Anyway workarounds that people have found would be greatly, greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Okay, so these are the steps to restore from the ReadyNAS via Time Machine in case of hard drive failure, in case anyone in interested. I don't know if this is the best way, but this worked for me.
1) Install Mac OS X 10.5 on the new hard drive and boot up the computer normally
2) When prompted to set up an account, make sure to create an account whose name and shortname are different than the one you'll be restoring - if you create an account with the same name+shortname as the one you'll be restoring, you won't be able to proceed later.
3) Once the initial setup of Mac OS X is complete, connect to your ReadyNAS via a Finder window and double-click on the sparsebundle of the backup you want to restore. This will mount the sparsebundle as a disk on your desktop. It will take a long time to do this (~15 minutes for me), so set it going and come back later.
4) Once the backup sparsebundle is mounted on your desktop, open up Migration Assistant, which is in your Applications -> Utilities folder.
5) In Migration Assistant, choose "From a Time Machine backup or other disk" and click Continue
6) "Select the System to Transfer": You should see your mounted sparsebundle appear on this screen. Select it and click Continue
7) "Select User Accounts to Transfer": This will take a while to figure out what user account(s) are store in the backup. Time for another cup of coffee (~5 minutes for me)...
8) Select the user account to restore and click Continue. If you disregarded step #2, this is where it will complain and say a user account by that name already exists, at which point you have to either a) enter a different name + shortname or b) quit, create a new Administrator account, log out, log in with the Administrator account, delete your other account, and start over from step #3.
9) Select the various things you want to restore and click Continue until the last screen, when you'll click Transfer
10) Wait a very long while (~1 hr and 45 minutes for me) while the restoration procedure continues
11) Voila! Time Machine restore from ReadyNAS complete!

My wife's MacBook had only 30 GB of stuff backed up, so when I note above that things will take a long time, your mileage may vary depending on the size of your backup. But as long it looks like the computer is still thinking, don't get discouraged at those steps and think it's frozen forever. It's not - just let it continue and come back later.

I've had to do it, and what you do is boot from the install DVD and pop a terminal window. Then you get to mount your backup drive from the command line:

$ mkdir /Volumes/backup
$ mount_afp afp://username:password@nasaddr/backupvolname /Volumes/backup

or so (I'm typing this straight from memory). Then quit the terminal, go back to disk restore, and pick the drive.

Avi

yoh-dah wrote:
The step-by-step how-to can be found here.

I keep getting the error message "The Backup disk image could not be created." I thought I carried out your instructions carefully, but I must've missed something? My NAS system is mounted and the sparesbundle is copied in there. I did make it's size 2T since that is the size of my NAS.

Thanks,
Milt

I recently purchased a ReadyNAS Duo for use on my home network (we have some PC laptops and a MacBook Air; everything is connected by a WRT310N wireless router).

One of my goals for the NAS was to use it for Time Machine backups of the MacBook Air. I followed the directions at http://www.readynas.com/?p=253 (which I thought were quite good, though Spotlight seems to "forget" that I've asked it not to index the Time Machine share). I think I got exactly one good backup.

After that, things became a real mess. The backup would start, but performance during the backup was extremely sluggish culminating in a never ending "pinwheel of death." This forum among others mentioned using the Console to track the progress of Time Machine backups, and this proved to be the key. After letting Time Machine run overnight and then doing a forced (hold the power button down) restart in the morning, I checked the "system.log" and found a whole lot of messages like this:

Sep 18 06:41:01 eponymous-2 kernel[0]: Virex Kext: "monitorActivity(/private/var/log/system.log) for action open file for write failed" Sep 18 06:41:01 eponymous-2 kernel[0]: Virex Kext: "monitorActivity(/Volumes/TMeponymous/eponymous_XXXXXXXXXXXX.sparsebundle/bands/20) for action close file after modify failed"

I'm a mechanical engineer, and still have only the vaguest notion of what these messages mean, but Google identified "Virex" as my virus scanner, McAfee 8.6 (I think that's the correct version number, but am not sure. if you read on you'll see why I don't know for sure anymore).

I fiddled around with the virus scanner settings, adding all the shares on the NAS to an exclude list and tried to run a Time Machine backup. No luck; I got the same sort of messages.

Fortunately, uninstalling the virus scanner completely seems to have solved the problem. I've now done a pleasantly uneventful backup.

Now I just have to find a new virus scanner.

eponymous wrote:
Fortunately, uninstalling the virus scanner completely seems to have solved the problem. I've now done a pleasantly uneventful backup. Now I just have to find a new virus scanner.

Why do you have a virus scanner on a Mac? Macs do not have viruses. It would be like having two firewalls installed on your network. Or maybe a better analogy would be wearing two rain coats? Have 2 spare tires in your trunk? Gosh, I could keep going for days.......

Has anyone figured out Levi's problem. I'm a newbie and trying to get TM to work with ReadyNAS via airport extreme. I've followed Levi's (and the original instructions) and am getting the error message that the "backup volume could not be mounted".

Thanks
(mac OS X 10.5.5, PowerPC G5, ReadyNas Duo )

RE: Backup Volume Could not be Mounted

Not being able to mount the volume usually (not always) refers to the sparseimage not being mountable rather than the NAS share. Please can you try the following:

Mount the share that you've configured to be used by timemachine
Open a finder window showing the share & the created sparsebundle
Force TM to start and watch to see if another sparsebundle is created then deleted on the share (will appear & disappear in finder)

If you do see the creation & deletion of a sparsebundle, then it means you have somehow got the name of your original manually create sparsebundle incorrect.

///P