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Forum Discussion
Offsite Backup of NAS TimeMachine
Ok so I use my ReadyNAS as a TimeMachine location, along with other storage tasks. But the issue I have is related to backing up the TimeMachine portion of the NAS to a smaller but suitable HDD to provide critical off site backups. This would be performed about monthly.
I tried using the USB backup built into the NAS. I eventually got it to work correctly, no thanks to information provided by the RAIDAR interface (sorry NETGEAR, but it was lacking), but the backup took about 5 days which meant my computers were not backing up for that time. It was an unacceptable amount of time to be un-backedup. So what I would like to try is manually backup the TimeMachine Sparsebundles manually over the network. But the only way I can see them is by mounting them on their respective machines. Is there a way to see the entire TimeMachine storage area on the NAS from any of the computers on the network? Or does anyone have a practical alternative? I'd rather not have to do a second localised backup with the portable HDD.
Thanks in advance. Cheers, Brook.
I tried using the USB backup built into the NAS. I eventually got it to work correctly, no thanks to information provided by the RAIDAR interface (sorry NETGEAR, but it was lacking), but the backup took about 5 days which meant my computers were not backing up for that time. It was an unacceptable amount of time to be un-backedup. So what I would like to try is manually backup the TimeMachine Sparsebundles manually over the network. But the only way I can see them is by mounting them on their respective machines. Is there a way to see the entire TimeMachine storage area on the NAS from any of the computers on the network? Or does anyone have a practical alternative? I'd rather not have to do a second localised backup with the portable HDD.
Thanks in advance. Cheers, Brook.
7 Replies
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- Below I assume you have the NV+ (v1 - silver chassis).
USB is CPU intensive. Sparc CPU is slow. Native Linux filesystem such as EXT3 (EXT2 is quicker still) would give best USB performance. Also there's an option under System > Performance to enable fast USB writes.
The backups are stored under /c/.timemachine (i.e. in the hidden ".timemachine" folder on the "c" volume).
You could connect via CIFS (i.e. \\ip.address.of.nas) as "admin" (Frontview user) and browse to the hidden folder on the "c" share.
You could alternatively share the destination on your PC and use Frontview backup to backup the Time Machine data.
Personally i backup Time Machine data NAS to NAS. - Yes to NV+
What sort of performance gain does fast USB offer. I have turned that on, but have not attempted it as I am not willing to take all backups offline for so long again. I've not found a free easy method to format the HDD to EXT3 on the Mac. Don't generally have access to any windows machines. Although I might in the next week. I'll see if I can gain access to the partition.
Thanks for your information. Cheers. - Hmm ok I see.
Connect to the NAS as the time-machine user (ReadyNAS) and the share (ReadyNAS) containing all the time-machine sparsebundles becomes available.
Thanks for your help. Cheers,. - Yes you can do what you did via AFP. It's actually what your Mac does when it backs up to the ReadyNAS
- Well I managed to access it the same way through CIFS as well.
The odd thing is before I setup to use the ReadyNAS as my time-machine location I would have the device NAS-NAME (AFP) in the finder side-bar. After setting up time-machine on the NAS I have that entry along with just NAS-NAME in the finder sidebar. But I can't access anything with the second device entry. Would be nice to have just the one, preferable without the connection format tagged on the end. Interesting when the time-machine sparsebundle mounts there is no indication which share or device format is in use at the time as is the case with the general user shares. - The additional entry is necessary and is a result of the NAS advertising the Time Machine service to your Mac.
- OK, Would be nice if Apple allowed some devices to be removed from the side-bar as is the other content.
EDIT - Meant Shared devices not the mounted devices.
Cheers,.
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