Setting up a 10.4 server with time machine?

[Dark Eternal]

I just installed 10.4 server on an old 450mhz 1st gen g4. I installed it on the 80gb IDE drive and am planing on putting in a a few 1tb drives in a software raid via a sonnet PCI sata card. My question is how do I set up the the drives to act as a time capsule for time machine backup under 10.5. We have 4 macs in the house all running 10.5 I would like to back up to it.

 

[Dark Eternal]

No one has done this?

 

[durosity]

Well, you can do it, but its unsupported and as such dubious as to if you should trust your backups to it. Basically share a folder on the 10.4 server, then mount it on your 10.5 system. Then open terminal.app, and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then open up the Time Machine control panel, and browse for the shared drive! Its worked ok for me, but do this at your own risk!

 

[foshizzle]

As long as the drive is shared over AFP you may not even need to run the command to show unsupported drives, though I may be incorrect. I do remember being able to backup to my iMac running 10.5 but I'm unsure If I ran the command before being able to see it as a time machine drive.

I do not have an apple server setup, but I am running a custom-built opensolaris server with 4 1.5TB drives in it that I backup two macs on 10.5 to over the network. One wired one wireless. I've had no issues except for once the image got corrupted but I just had disk utility fix it and it was back to normal again. I'd just be careful about stopping the backup abruptly over the network, as if the computer is unable to finish the backup and unmount the drive it might have trouble with backups after that and you'll have to fix the image or start from scratch.

Check out timemachineeditor, a free app that lets you choose when to backup, i.e. not every hour and not when the computer comes out of standby or sleep (which is annoying over the wireless network).

Also, do the initial backups over ethernet. Even if you have 802.11n wireless it would be painfully slow. After that you should be fine for the incremental backups.

Be sure that you have a procedure in place to be able to do a complete restore from the backup over the network should you need to. Just bootup from the leopard disc and see if you can mount and see the time machine images as an option to restore to.

Sure, it is unsupported to use timemachine like this, but i've been doing so for a number of months with no problems on one machine and one problem due to user-error on another machine. Good luck with this!

 

[Dark Eternal]

awesome, it looks like this will work, just need to get a few drives to back it up to now.