So you’ve got a server running OS X 10.4 and you’ve got a lot of available drive space, why not put that drive space to use ? As many of you know OS X 10.5 Leopard has a new feature, Time Machine.

Time machine is an invaluable tool for Mac users. It makes backing up and restoring your Mac simple and convenient. Up until a few updates ago, the only devices you could use as a backup device for time machine were external drives connected via USB or Firewire or an additional partition on an internal drive.

What if you have multiple Macs that you want to back up, well if you have Mac OS X Server 10.5, this can be easily accomplished, just make a new share point on the server and set time machine to backup to the share point you created. Simple right ?

What if you have OS X Server 10.4 ? By default Time Machine does not support share points created on OS X Server 10.4 as volumes to use for Time Machine, but hey, that’s what this post is all about, showing you how to do it on OS X Server 10.4

All you have to do is make a new share point on OS X Server with Workgroup Manager and then go to your Mac that has Leopard installed and open up Terminal. In Terminal type the following:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Wait a few minutes, then go into Time Machine preferences and the network drive that you mounted should show up.

 

Problems With Creating The Backup Disk Image

If time Machine says “The backup disk image could not be created” during the first backup attempt you can do the following to avoid this problem and some others (backup fail due to permissions):

In short, you have to create the backup disk image on your Desktop and copy it to your mounted Time Machine volume. But Time Machine creates a unique filename for the disk image and we can find out this name with a little trick:

Click the Apple Icon on the top left of your screen, then click on About This Mac. You’ll get a dialog box, click on More Info… Scroll down to Network, expand and click on Locations. On the right pane scroll down to Ethernet and find Hardware ( Mac ) Address as illustrated below:

Write down the mac address, omitting the colons, we’ll need this address later when we name our sparsebundle image.

You’ll need to know your exact computer name as it appears on the network before proceeding to the next step. If you don’t know your computer name, follow below to obtain it.

Click on the Apple Icon on the top left corner of your screen and select System Preferences, then click on Sharing, copy what’s in the Computer Name: text field or just memorize it for later.

Now that we have all of the information we need, we can go ahead and create our disk image. Follow the steps below to create the image.

Open up Disk Utility ( Macintosh HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility )

Click on New Image

For the Save As text box enter your computername_macaddress.sparsebundle

For Image Format select sparse bundle disk image

For Volume Size, select custom and enter in the size of your hard drive at a minimum

Here’s a sample of how it should look

Set your location to your desktop and click on create. After the image has been created, copy it to your mounted volume and go to Time Machine preferences to ensure that your mounted volume is selected as the device to be used for backups. Start your backup and all should be working.

written by admin \\ tags: How To, Mac OS X Server 10.4, Tips & Tricks