Posts Tagged ‘time machine’

Easy and Free Network-based Time Machine Backup

I’ve been looking for a network-based (free) solution for backing up a couple of Macs using Time Machine at home for some time. Plugging external drives into our two Macs was doable, but not exactly convenient. There’s plenty of how-tos out there on setting up a Linux machine to offer up an AFP share and then hacking it to support Time Machine, but those seemed more like a hack to me and users reported mixed luck. I needed something that ‘just worked’. Enter: FreeNAS.

I actually was setting up and playing with FreeNAS after reading about it on an article from MaximumPC. I’d set it up before and played with it, but I didn’t quite realize how much progress they had made. When playing with the AFP settings, I ran across the Time Machine option in the interface.

Setting up Time Machine to backup to your FreeNAS is pretty straight forward. First, you’ll want to start with a base install of FreeNAS with enough space to hold your backups. There’s plenty of good how-to’s out there including the one I mentioned earlier, so I don’t really see a point in me covering it here.

First, you’ll want to enable AFP on the server. You just have to simply go to Services -> AFP in the interface, check the “Enable” check box on the far right, enable local user authentication, and click the “Save and Restart” button to turn AFP on.

auto-disk-discovery-time-machine

Next, you’ll need to add a user. In the interface menu, go to Access -> Users and Groups. Add a user and call it what you like.

Now, hop back to the AFP management and click on the Shares tab. Add a share. When you add the share, be sure to add your user as a user that can read and write to the share as well as enable automatic disk discovery and set the discovery mode to “Time Machine”. Once finished, be sure to click the “Apply changes” button (a step I’ve missed a time or two :) ).

On my Mac, I had to authenticate to the AFP server once in Finder. Then, go into the Time Machine preferences and you should be able to add your new share as a Time Machine disk. I’d suggest making sure that you plug into a wired network for the first backup if you normally wander around with your Mac on wireless.

So far it’s working pretty solidly and was simple to setup. In my case, the whole thing was free as I am running it in VMware on a machine that would be on anyway.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 8th, 2009

Mac OS X 10.5.5 Released

The latest patch for OS X 10.5.5 is now available. It includes performance improvements for Spotlight, Time Machine, and Mail. Time Machine and Mail both have some significant fixes. A memory leak in Time Machine along with an issue where permissions are too open on the backup target have been fixed. It seems that issues with searching in Mail mentioned by AppleInsider are not resolved in the update. The update also includes fixes for syncing with several services and devices including the iPhone, Palm devices, and MobileMe. The update weighs in at 136MB and is paired with a Front Row update as well. More detailed info on the update can be found on the Apple support site.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 15th, 2008