Looking for a good 'network' Time Machine Drive

[markw10]

Now that I've upgraded to Leopard I want to get a Time Machine Backup Hard Drive and am looking for a drive that is at least 750GB, possibly up to 1TB.

I know that at least currently Time Machine won't work with Airport Base Station Hard Drives. If I have to I'll just direct connect a hard drive via Firewire but my preference is to connect a hard drive through a Home Network (directly connected via Ethernet). I've heard this is an option but now that Time Machine has been out for awhile what type of experience have users been having with this set up?

Two things I'm looking for though:

So that I various options for hooking up this drive in the future I want one that has Ethernet, USB, and Firewire connectors

I've heard there is a certain type of format that you need with networked hard drives in order for them to work with Time Machine. I'm not familiar with exactly what I need so what type of hard drive do I need?

Lastly, if I'm using this in my home with Ethernet if I take a business trip can I simply take the hard drive with me and connect via Firewire and continue using as a Time Machine drive while on the road?

[dfiler]

The fastest and easiest way to use time machine is via a directly attached firewire drive. Using a drive attached to APE is significantly slower even over gigabit ethernet. Although, that might not matter to you, depending on your usage.

Another fast way to use time machine is to buy a NAS that supports hfs+/afp. There are only a couple of these on the market. (I think ReadyNAS is one of them). You cannot use time machine with a NAS unless it has that functionality.

Finally, if you have a spare mac you can use it for time machine.

Basically, if you want fast backups but can't afford a gigabit network and supported NAS, use a directly attached firewire drive. Otherwise, any ole drive plugged into the base station is the easiest thing to do.

[dmegatool]

I found this procedure. Seems to work great from the comments I've seen. I didn't try it tought.

http://www.pixelmemory.us/TimeMachineNAS/index.html

[dfiler]

Woah, thanks for the link. I'll give that a shot this weekend.

Similar hacks have apparently had mixed results. Someone posts that they've got time machine working perfectly on their NAS. I think "excellent!" Only to keep reading and discover that others have tried the same thing but ran into bugs.

Hopefully this is the one...

[dmegatool]

Yeah I know what you mean.

I don't have a NAS now so I can't test but I'm looking to buy one so that's why I'm actually searching for a solution.

I found theses one that seems pretty simple:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

or

1. Connect your USB disk directly to the Mac
2. Set up Time Machine and let your initial backup run
3. Eject the disk and connect to the AEBS
4. You need to 'touch' the disk by opening it in Finder, then Time Machine realises where it is and carries on.

[dfiler]

I found theses one that seems pretty simple:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1Unfortunately, that only works if your NAS support hfs+. Otherwise, additional hacking is required and no known method consistently works for everyone. (yet)

[markw10]

I'm interested in a NAS so will see what I can find on the market that supports HFS+/AFP.

[dfiler]

I found this procedure. Seems to work great from the comments I've seen. I didn't try it tought.

http://www.pixelmemory.us/TimeMachineNAS/index.htmlI performed this simple hack this morning and Time Machine is busy doing it's thing. I'll let you know how it works out. Could take a while with nearly two million "items" to backup. :lol:

The NAS I'm using is built from an nforce4 board, Q6600 quadcore, an Areca ARC-1220 RAID card, 6 Maxline III 300GB drives in RAID 5, and Vista Business 32bit providing an smb share. This array can easily do a couple hundred megs a second. With gigabit ethernet and jumbo frames, the iMac's HD will be the bottleneck.

Menu meters is showing a throughput of around 28MB/sec, fluctuating +/- 5MB/sec. That indicates that everything is performing about as well as expected. The iMac's HD sustained read speed isn't too much better than that most of the time.

Overall, I'm impressed. A full initial backup via Time Machine doesn't appear to be imposing any lag on my everyday use of the iMac. It appears to quickly throttle back when anything else is going on.

Edit:
The backup slows down intermittently. Down to as low as 3MB/sec at times. My theory is that it has to do with the size of file currently being transfered.

[turtle]

So when you run this hack, will it break with the next update? (ie. 10.5.2)

I'm looking to build a system to allow this as well. Maybe even just get Leopard Server for my hosting needs anyway which would alleviate the need for the hack. However, I want to know my options.