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January 15, 2008

Time Machine on NAS ()

by fluffy at 12:08 PM
Okay, so during the Stevenote, Time Capsule was announced, but there was no mention made of whether this meant that there was Time Machine on generic NAS, or if you have to buy a Time Capsule for this. However, on the Leopard Time Machine page, there's now this text:
Pick a disk. Any disk.

You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.

So, this means that you can at least use another Mac (perfect for my home ecosystem), and the implication is that any NAS which speaks AFP would also work as well (though SMB/NFS probably aren't). Still, this is very good news, and finally a reason to upgrade my laptops to Leopard.

Comments

#10366 EddieZ (unregistered) 01/17/2008 11:22 am
You can use an SMB based NAS drive to backup - at least you can use a Drobo hooked into a DroboShare (which is SMB based). I believe the chatter on their forums is saying this will work.
#10367 01/17/2008 06:07 pm
Are there any problems with data/metadata loss? I know there's rumblings out there about forcing Time Machine to work on any mounted volume but they all come with disclaimers to that effect.
#10375 01/19/2008 05:03 pm
My experimentation has suggested that Time Machine will generate a sparsebundle disk image to do backups on remote volumes, making metadata issues moot.
#10376 01/19/2008 05:13 pm
Hm!
#10378 01/20/2008 03:32 am
Sparsebundles are really very neat. They dynamically allocate space to the disk image like sparseimages did, but they store each (8MB) chunk in an individual file, so they're much less likely to suffer the corruption issues (especially on hard shutdown) which showed up with sparseimages.

They're almost enough to convince me to start trusting FileVault again.