Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Can Time Machine backup Wirelessly?

M

martinmartin

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 5, 2007
435
1
Does anyone know if we will be able to backup our computers using Time Machine by connecting wirelessly to an external hard drive hooked up to, say, an airport extreme base?

I currently use Super Duper, but I don't think it can back up wirelessly. I believe it requires a physical connection to the hard drive.

Cheers.
 
The short answer - no.

The can it be done answer is well, yes if you tried setting an iSCSI initiator and some fumbling with mounts, but really, why would you?
 
The short answer... YES!!!

Time Machine will run a checksum on all data to verify integrity.
Over wireless, it can definitely be a little slower than one would expect from a local drive, however it does work perfectly fine.

The biggest thing is flow latency (not packet latency). The longer it takes to complete a flow (pulling or pushing a file), the slower and more erratic time machine will appear, just like when working with Finder over the network, or any other file system browser.
 
projectle said:
The short answer... YES!!!

Time Machine will run a checksum on all data to verify integrity.
Over wireless, it can definitely be a little slower than one would expect from a local drive, however it does work perfectly fine.

The biggest thing is flow latency (not packet latency). The longer it takes to complete a flow (pulling or pushing a file), the slower and more erratic time machine will appear, just like when working with Finder over the network, or any other file system browser.
Click to expand...

Omitting your last paragraph, how would suggest setting that up? I assume you have Leopard running and have tested this?
 
WildPalms said:
Omitting your last paragraph, how would suggest setting that up? I assume you have Leopard running and have tested this?
Click to expand...

I don't have it and haven't used it. Right now, Apple's pages explicitly mention that file shares on Macs running Leopard are supported, meaning that TM is capable of working over a network. It's been pretty widely assumed that Airdisk would be supported too, and I think it may have been mentioned by Apple when the AEBS was announced, although, oddly, right now neither the TM nor the Airdisk pages discuss using Airdisk.
 
mkrishnan said:
I don't have it and haven't used it. Right now, Apple's pages explicitly mention that file shares on Macs running Leopard are supported, meaning that TM is capable of working over a network. It's been pretty widely assumed that Airdisk would be supported too, and I think it may have been mentioned by Apple when the AEBS was announced, although, oddly, right now neither the TM nor the Airdisk pages discuss using Airdisk.
Click to expand...

Ahh I see it. "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." ... .the key being "another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing"

So it would proxy the write requests. Writing over a network is a little different. e.g. over CIFS, NFS, etc

I would be curious to see if the Airport Extreme can handle the requests over AFP. I'll post back here after this week is done. Too much work on. :(
 
WildPalms said:
So it would proxy the write requests. Writing over a network is a little different. e.g. over CIFS, NFS, etc
Click to expand...

I think you're very correct, that proxying is very important. This system absolutely needs to have reliable rollback on failure, or else the time machine archive is going to be a random mess of unusable files.

The fact that they want the other Mac to also run Leopard is minorly surprising. Apparently Leopard activates some new tweaks to HFS+ / POSIX that are related to multiple hard links that are not available / going to be available in Tiger.

But my understanding is that Airdisk also proxies the requests -- that it is pretty much an HFS server. Perhaps they just have not finished the porting of the necessary HFS/POSIX-related code to the Airdisk software yet, or made it reliable enough for Time Machine to be practical.
 
I would expect a lot of updates to be coming down the pipe very shortly.

You can set up anything that you want as a TimeMachine volume, even ZFS drives if you have the ZFS Enabler... (From what I hear).

All one would need to do is create a single file on the root of the drive.
The simplest way would be through Terminal...

Mac# touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported

This will create a hidden file for you so that you can avoid having to look at the file whenever you open the drive.

Enjoy!
 
At WWDC, Jobs specifically said that an external USB drive on an Airport Extreme (with either wired or wireless connections) would be compatible with Time Machine.
 
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.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5581444


....and for the 3rd time, I tried it to no avail.

There may be a forthcoming firmware update for the AEBS, but its not available now.
 
mkrishnan said:
I don't have it and haven't used it. Right now, Apple's pages explicitly mention that file shares on Macs running Leopard are supported, meaning that TM is capable of working over a network. It's been pretty widely assumed that Airdisk would be supported too, and I think it may have been mentioned by Apple when the AEBS was announced, although, oddly, right now neither the TM nor the Airdisk pages discuss using Airdisk.
Click to expand...

TM will not work over Airdisk. It will work with Leopard file sharing, but not Airdisk or Tiger File Sharing. I got this straight from an Apple rep. Supposedly an update will come out to make it work, but not right away.
 
Hmm, I was going to buy an extreme basestation on Friday to go with my new copy of Leopard, guess I'll wait a bit on that one.

Should give the credit card a bit of time to cool down I suppose though!
 
TM Works fine with AEBS

I don't know if this helps but TM is working fine for me with my Airdisk.

I noticed a lot of people having trouble but i had none, I had Timemachine allready running on a 1TB USB drive which is partitioned as two drives, 1 for TM and 1 for file storage. I went out about a week ago and bought the new AEBS with gigabit ethernet and pluged the usb drive in and TM just kept working. I didn't do anything special except disable all the IPv6 stuff in the AEBS and my Leopard.

Maybe its the IPv6 stuff, i don't know, but IPv6 does hav major issues so i allways disable it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back