Can Readynas Duo use an external drive for Time Machine?
I have a Readynas Duo (with the latest Radiator), I would like to use it as a Time Machine. However, the 2TB of space it has are very precious to me. The good news is that I have an external drive that I would like to use for my backups.
The question is, is there a way to tell the Readynas to use the external drive for the Time Machine?
Re: Can Readynas Duo use an external drive for Time Machine?
Just wanted to come here and say that this CAN be done, you just have to use the "old school" method. I have the same reasoning as you guys, my backup does not need to be RAIDed; to me, that is a little too redundant. Any way the steps are pretty simple. First get your hard drive set up on the USB port, make sure you can access it from your mac (cmd+K to mount the share, share name should be something like: AFP://<IP ADDRESS OF NAS>/USB_HDD_1). I cleaned mine out by formatting it from the admin console. After that I used the manual sparsebundle creation method. I will post the steps below, but I found them at http://code.stephenmorley.org/articles/time-machine-on-a-network-drive/. It may be easier for you to follow there, plus it comes with screen shots.
---[Reposted steps below]--- 1. Ensure the network drive is mounted:
1a. Click ‘Go’ and then ‘Network’ and double-click on your network drive. If your network drive is protected, enter your username and password.
2. Find the name of your computer on the network:
2a. Open System Preferences. 2b. Click the Sharing icon. 2c. The computer name on the network is shown below the input field, with a ‘.local’ suffix which should be ignored (that is, if it shows stephenmorley.local then your computer’s network name is stephenmorley).
3. Ensure Time Machine will show your NAS device:
3a. Click ‘Go’ and then ‘Utilities’. 3b. Click the Terminal icon. 3c. Type defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 and press enter.
4. Find the MAC address of your computer:
4a. Type ifconfig en0 | grep ether and press enter. Your MAC address is the 17-character string consisting of six pairs of hexadecimal digits separated by colons. Make sure you get the right ethernet card, mine was en1. Just do an "ifconfig" and see which one has your IP address..
Creating the sparse bundle
5. Create the sparse bundle:
5a. Type hdiutil create -size 100g -fs HFS+J -volname "Time Machine" NAME_XXXXXXXXXXXX.sparsebundle and press enter, where NAME is the name of your computer on the network (as determined in step 2c) and XXXXXXXXXX is your MAC address (as determined in step 4a) without the colons. Ths will create a 100 gigabyte sparse bundle; to create a sparse bundle of a different size replace 100g with a different value. 5b. Type rsync -aE NAME_XXXXXXXXXXXX.sparsebundle /Volumes/DRIVE/. and press enter, where DRIVE is the name of your network drive. This will copy the sparse bundle to the network drive, and will take several seconds. 5c. Type rm -rf NAME_XXXXXXXXXXXX.sparsebundle and press enter. This will delete the copy of the sparse bundle on your computer. You can now close Terminal.
Setting up Time Machine
6. Select the back-up location:
6a. Click the Time Machine icon and then Open Time Machine Preferences. 6b. Click the Choose Backup Disk button. 6c. Select the network drive and then click the Use For Backup button. Time Machine will show the drive’s full capacity, but back-ups will be limited to the size chosen in step 5a.
7. Start the back-up:
7a. Time Machine will start the back-up automatically after two minutes. Alternative, click the Time Machine icon and then Back Up Now. 7b. Time Machine will show a status of ‘Preparing…’ while it determines which files to back up. 7c. After a few minutes the back-up will begin and the status will change to ‘Backing up’. 7d. While the back-up is in progress, a volume called Time Machine will be shown on the desktop. Once the back-up completes, this volume will disappear.
Re: Can Readynas Duo use an external drive for Time Machine?
credo what version of Mac OS X have you tested this on? I'd be surprised if this would work with 10.7 Lion. One would think some Netatalk configuration changes on the NAS (if possible) would also be needed or needed instead.
