Is there a way to make a server act like a time machine?

[jamesjingyi]

I have signed up at Box for 50GB of free storage and was wondering whether I could use this for a time machine backup?

Thanks in advance

James

 

[Weaselboy]

I have signed up at Box for 50GB of free storage and was wondering whether I could use this for a time machine backup?

Thanks in advance

James

Nope... that won't work. Time Machine needs a HFS+ formatted disk as a destination and it needs to be over the AFS network protocol. box.net won't meet either of those requirements.

If you want offsite backup like that you will need to subscribe to something like Crashplan or similar.

 

[Nermal]

Nope... that won't work. Time Machine needs a HFS+ formatted disk as a destination and it needs to be over the AFS network protocol. box.net won't meet either of those requirements.

I have an HP "home server" that uses NTFS on the drives, and I'm pretty sure that it uses SMB. It gets around the HFS+ limitation by creating an image file. As for the protocol, I'm not sure whether it does something clever with AFP or whether Time Machine can actually use SMB.

 

[tampasteve]

Even if it could use Box as the Time Machine drive you are limited by the upload file size of Box which may be smaller than your backup file. Below are the max file sizes per upload:

Free personal: 250MB
Starter: 2GB
Business: 5GB
Enterprise: 5GB

Assuming you have the free Box 50GB that they are offering you would be limited to a file of 250MB at one time.

 

[Weaselboy]

I have an HP "home server" that uses NTFS on the drives, and I'm pretty sure that it uses SMB. It gets around the HFS+ limitation by creating an image file. As for the protocol, I'm not sure whether it does something clever with AFP or whether Time Machine can actually use SMB.

Yeah... a sparse bundle would get around the HFS+ issue, but I know TM needs AFS. I have read about people tricking it into using SMB, but it does not seem to be reliable.