Mac G5 Xserve issues backing up my High Sierra Mac.

[sixxdog_uk]

Hi There Everyone,

Im running a G5 XSERVE on 10.5.8.

All is running fine but I want to enable to Time Machine Services of the XSERVE to back up my other Macs to it.

I've run into a problem that my High Sierra Intel Mac says it can't use this time machine disk as it does not meet requirements.

Could it be I'm trying to back up an Intel based machine to a PPC Mac? or the Disk Type of the drive I'm trying to back up to? I have a 1TB formatted in the XSERVE as Apple File Partition using Extended Journaled File System.

I know the XSERVE is a power hog and I could use a NAS for the same thing , in fact I used a Drobo for my everyday backups , this is more of a learning curve.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

 

[eyoungren]

If you haven't already, open Terminal and use this command (on the High Sierra Mac).

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

That enables TM on unsupported drives (network drives). I have no idea if this is necessary under High Sierra or if the command will even work for High Sierra, but it's necessary under older versions of OS X.

Finally, using AFP for TM on later versions of OS X is deprecated. You need to share the drive from your XServe using SMB. Connect using SMB from the High Sierra Mac.

 

[sixxdog_uk]

Thanks eyounugren , ill try that and report back

 

[sixxdog_uk]

hi there,

so this didn't work , its very odd . I've turned off the time machine server service on the XSERVE as this seems depreciated now , and have just created a standard shared folder , which as advised above I have connected to using SMB://192.168.0.xx this connects and I can copy files to it , but it does not appear in my list of usable drives or folders for time machine on my High Sierra Mac?

Any other ideas ?

Thanks, as always.

EDIT : The drive I am trying to use is formatted using GUID and Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

 

[eyoungren]

hi there,

so this didn't work , its very odd . I've turned off the time machine server service on the XSERVE as this seems depreciated now , and have just created a standard shared folder , which as advised above I have connected to using SMB://192.168.0.xx this connects and I can copy files to it , but it does not appear in my list of usable drives or folders for time machine on my High Sierra Mac?

Any other ideas ?

Thanks, as always.

EDIT : The drive I am trying to use is formatted using GUID and Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

Did you use the Terminal command I mentioned above?

 

[sixxdog_uk]

HI There,

Yes I used that command line and it accepted the command without issue.

I'm now trying a standard OSX on the XSERVE instead of the Server OSX , I think it might be some weird permissions problem , at least this way I can just set a standard share as SMB and even say use it as a time machine volume , lets see how that goes

Thanks again.

 

[sixxdog_uk]

UPDATE :

Even running bog standard osx 10.5.8 setting sharing over SMB only on AND running the terminal command , this High Sierra machine refuses to connect to the share as a time machine drive. It connects over AFP & SMB as a normal share but TM hates it which is weird as my NAS (Drobo 5n2)is connected over afp and it works like a charm , does anyone know the version of SMB that the 10.5.8 OSX used , as I'm thinking this may be an issue , but then again maybe not as it can connect using the SMB:// command , it's a mystery.

 

[eyoungren]

UPDATE :

Even running bog standard osx 10.5.8 setting sharing over SMB only on AND running the terminal command , this High Sierra machine refuses to connect to the share as a time machine drive. It connects over AFP & SMB as a normal share but TM hates it which is weird as my NAS (Drobo 5n2)is connected over afp and it works like a charm , does anyone know the version of SMB that the 10.5.8 OSX used , as I'm thinking this may be an issue , but then again maybe not as it can connect using the SMB:// command , it's a mystery.

It's a non-standard form of SMB. Outside of using DAVE on Leopard, there's a way to get a current version of SMB installed but it involves mainly using Terminal.

It wasn't until around Yosemite I believe that Apple finally started using the industry standard SMB. Before that it was their own version.

I understand your frustration as there was a point in time where I was trying to keep both Intel and PowerPC Macs backing up to one shared drive being hosted from Leopard. When things worked it was slow, but most of the time different parts were broken or broke immediately after a long but successful backup.

I moved on to just using Carbon Copy Cloner for backups. You can schedule it and it can backup to sparseimage or sparsebundle. I've got both weekly and daily backups that run and the bonus is that since these are disk images I can move them anywhere and restore directly from the image.

My weekly backups go direct to my Dropbox folder so I can get to any of them from anywhere as long as I have internet.