Migrating Time Machine to a NAS

Discussion in 'Mac Accessories' started by Skormy, Dec 29, 2013.

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  1. Skormy, Dec 29, 2013

    Skormy macrumors newbie

    Joined:
    Nov 27, 2013
    #1
    I have a new Synology DS213J and one of the reasons I bought the NAS is to migrate Time Machine from my DAS to the NAS. I have been following the instructions I’ve found online. The first thing I did was create a user and a shared folder on my second volume. I turned off Time Machine, copied the backups.backupsdb folder and went to paste it on my shared folder and the following message displayed: Volume is wrong format for backup.
    It is formatted as basic (without data protection), ext4, with just a name of volume 2. I can copy “regular” files to the NAS volume.

    Is there a formatting setting I missed? I’m a newbie to this area. Thanks in advance.
     
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  2. priitv8, Dec 29, 2013

    priitv8 macrumors 68040

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    Estonia
    #2
    That's probably one of the reasons why network backups are held in disk image files called sparsebundles. Those images represent a HFS+ Journaled filesystem and can be expanded on the fly. Yet they can be stored on any host filesystem. Well, not the ones with file size cap as the sparsebundles can grow very large.
    Check http://pondini.org for details.
     
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  3. Weaselboy, Dec 30, 2013

    Weaselboy Moderator

    Weaselboy

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    Joined:
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    Location:
    California
    #3
    Like priitv8 mentioned, networked TM backups are stored in a sparse bundle. There is a workaround where you start a new backup on the network drive to create the sparse bundle, then stop the backup and copy in your old backups.backupsdb file. Here is a walkthrough.
     
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