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Using Time Machine over a network on a shared drive

thesheep

thesheep

macrumors regular
Original poster
I have a drive connected to my MacBook Pro, and then a separate Powerbook on the same network. Both computers are running Leopard, and I want to configure Time Machine on the Powerbook to backup to the external drive connected to my other Mac.

On my MBP I go to the external drive, right click, and click 'Shared Folder'. Then on the PB I can see the MBP on the network, and I can connect as Guest and browse the external drive, no problem. So it seems to be mounted.

If I open Time Machine preferences, I am able to select the external drive as a backup. But when I try to initiate a backup, I get an error symbol and it says 'Backup failed' because 'Backup drive failed to mount'. The backup drive is clearly already mounted because I can browse to it on Finder. Any ideas?

This situation is made slightly more complex because I did an initial backup by connecting directly to the drive over Firewire. I was hoping that it would just adopt that same drive over the network and continue to use those backups. But I don't really mind if it has to start again, and I have to leave it overnight to backup the first time. Right now, neither is working, over the network.
 
how was the drive formatted?

And what happens if you browse the drive over the network first before trying to launch time machine?
 
The drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). As I said, I can browse to this drive no problem from the Powerbook. I can open documents, etc. It is only when I try to use it with Time Machine that I get the error about failing to mount. Clearly, it is already mounted, so this doesn't make a lot of sense to me...
 
I have the same setup and it works perfectly.
When I tried to replicate the same setup for my friends computers, I could not back up from the second computer to the external drive.
How I got it to work was to perform the first backup with the drive connected directly to the second computer, form there all other backups where performed through the local network (computer one communicates with the second one via Airport).

BTW - The external drive is connected to computer one via USB.

HTH
 
Do you think that this solution will work for any network accessible share? For example, could I mount an NFS share off of my SuSE machine and perform Time Machine backups? Or will this only work if the network share is on another OS X machine?

Thanks!
 
Do you think that this solution will work for any network accessible share? For example, could I mount an NFS share off of my SuSE machine and perform Time Machine backups? Or will this only work if the network share is on another OS X machine?
Click to expand...

There was another thread on exactly the same subject and it's worth searching for it within the forum because it did answer your question.

HTH
 
Halcyon said:
There was another thread on exactly the same subject and it's worth searching for it within the forum because it did answer your question.
Click to expand...

I took a look at the other thread, and I don't see where they are talking about sharing from SuSE/Linux. Am I missing it?
 
michaeldpotter said:
I took a look at the other thread, and I don't see where they are talking about sharing from SuSE/Linux. Am I missing it?
Click to expand...

Sorry, what you're missing is that my post was meant to the OP. Maybe the automatic quote (which quoted you) on my reply misguided you. Anyway, it's always better to start a new thread rather than to highjack one, because as you can see this is how misunderstandings get fueled.

My link to the OP still stand and I believe it solves his inquiries.
 
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