Mac NAS with auto backup

[mattbray]

I purchased a Lacie Ethernet RAID for my boss's house in the hopes that I could set up his Macs and PCs to backup automatically. Lacie includes software for automatic Windows backups but none for Macs. I thought I would be able to set up "Backup" (the client that comes with .Mac) to do backups to the NAS automatically. It turns out that Macs connect to the NAS by mounting the share as a server. It works fine for hosting files but backups won't happen automatically if they restart their Macs but forget to mount the server. I thought the NAS would make things seamless but it turns out that this only solved the problem for his Windows machines.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated...

 

[italiano40]

if it is leopard you can just use Time machine to auto backup to it
also search the web for a program that can back and it should solve your problems

 

[mattbray]

Negative.

Leopard won't back up to the NAS and that wouldn't solve the problem of auto-mounting.

 

[italiano40]

is the Nas server setup for time machine because that should be able to auto mount it.

and windows can write and read from a time machine server

 

[Heb1228]

You could try something like this and then schedule backups with another backup utility. I like SuperDuper but you may not want full drive clones.

 

[mattbray]

I'll give that a try. Thanks a lot

 

[CarlsonCustoms]

Why not use the terminal command Rsync to do the backups to the NAS with an automater script. If you google Rsync there is tutorials.

Zack

 

[ab2650]

I'll give that a try. Thanks a lot

I haven't used the Automounter download, but it is possible to use Automator to mount network volumes and add the Automator script to startup items. You can also do the same with Applescript although it involves knowing a bit about scripting/programming.

I've done both with varied success (in short, SMB worked great in Automator, but for AFP I switched to Applescript to avoid the username/password prompt.)

And even if LaCie didn't provide an automated backup solution for OS X, you should be able to find/create one easily enough, considering the UNIX foundation.

 

[mattbray]

Automator

I tried setting up Automator by following the steps I found online and it launched the workflow in Automator but it did not run the workflow. I need something that will seamlessly launch the share on startup without any input from the user.

 

[ab2650]

I tried setting up Automator by following the steps I found online and it launched the workflow in Automator but it did not run the workflow. I need something that will seamlessly launch the share on startup without any input from the user.

Try the following applescript, then add it to Login Items for the user that is doing the backup:

tell application "Finder"
	mount volume ¬
		"afp://192.168.1.x/share" as user name "username" with password "password"
end tell

BTW, that's using AFP, but you can change it to SMB for that type of share. 192.168.1.x is the IP address or name of the server, and username and password are obvious. GL, and if you need more help, drop me a line.

 

[mattbray]

Thank you so much AB. I assembled the applescript that you provided, saved it as an application and added it to startup items. It worked like a charm. Thanks a bunch.

 

[synth3tik]

You can still use carbon copy cloner, or another mac back up program, there are even a few freeware programs out there, can't think of any off the top right now. I hope to see NAS support in Leopard soon.

 

[ab2650]

Thank you so much AB. I assembled the applescript that you provided, saved it as an application and added it to startup items. It worked like a charm. Thanks a bunch.

You're very welcome. I went through the same thing as you, trying to get a network share to mount on login and spent way too long trying to figure it out. I like Automator, but when mounting AFP shares it always prompts for login information, even if it's been cached. The appleshare version amazingly didn't do that; at least it doesn't in Tiger.

 

[ab2650]

It worked like a charm.

Here's something I didn't think about... I recently did the 10.4.11 upgrade and on connecting to an AFP share I was notified that something had been updated that needed confirmation for accessing my keychain.

Now since the applescript doesn't use the keychain (or shouldn't, i should say) this probably is a moot point... However it is something to pay attention to for things like auto-mount scripts. If you are running Tiger on the system and did the update, do you know if it prompted the user about keychain access?