How can I backup our 1 MAC to a non-mac network
We have one MAC computer on our network. We backup all of our computers to networked drives. I would like to be able to do the same with this computer without having to install a whole server just for it. I also do not want to do just a local backup, that defeats my networked backup policy. Anyone have a work around for me.
Allan Martins
Does you mac reach the network? You should have no problem as long as the mac can authenticate and list the files on your network. Can you provide further details about your current infrastructure?
ASKER
We have our mac running OSX 10.7 Lion joined to Active Directory and we are able to browse out to our Windows server SMB shares. The problem is that TimeMachine doesn't seem to have an option for a network backup without it being an Apple TimeCapsule. Is there another application that would work better for backing up files in this situation?
Found this online a while ago: this should allow you to backup to a network share. I have tried this and got it to work fine for me.
Obviously you need to be running Leopard or newer and you’ll need a network share which is larger or equal to your hard drive in your Mac. In my case these shares are in SMB and AFP.
1. Go into Applications / Utilities and open up terminal
2. Copy and paste this command into terminal (all on one line)
defaults write com.apple.systempreference
3. Hit enter / return
4. Mount your network share, in my case my share is off our server called INAS1 and my share is called User-Backups
5. Go to System Preferences and open Time Machine
6. Click on Change Disk
7. Select the share you wish to backup to, I’ve selected User-Backups
6. That’s it, you’re done
Wait up to 15 minutes and you should be set. To verify it is working open up your network share in Finder and you should see a file which is named [your computer name] [your MAC address].sparsebundle
Obviously you need to be running Leopard or newer and you’ll need a network share which is larger or equal to your hard drive in your Mac. In my case these shares are in SMB and AFP.
1. Go into Applications / Utilities and open up terminal
2. Copy and paste this command into terminal (all on one line)
defaults write com.apple.systempreference
3. Hit enter / return
4. Mount your network share, in my case my share is off our server called INAS1 and my share is called User-Backups
5. Go to System Preferences and open Time Machine
6. Click on Change Disk
7. Select the share you wish to backup to, I’ve selected User-Backups
6. That’s it, you’re done
Wait up to 15 minutes and you should be set. To verify it is working open up your network share in Finder and you should see a file which is named [your computer name] [your MAC address].sparsebundle
ASKER
I followed these steps and it looked like it was working perfectly when it recognized the mounted share and it said the backup had started, but then it kicked back an error saying "The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features". Is your User-Backups share on a Windows Server or a Mac server? As far as I can tell our Windows Server 2008 server doesn't natively support AFP and I don't really want to do a third party workaround just to get one computer to backup. Is this the end of the line for TimeMachine backups or is there possibly another way to enable this? Thanks for your help.
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ASKER
Thanks for the help. This solution worked to get timemachine backup working but we decided to just add this machine to our server backup software for a little more administrative control.