Time Machine Issue I Haven't Seen Answered

[FortunesFool]

So I finally got around to getting a 1tb drive to hook up to my airport extreme to do TM backups. I have ~420gb to backup on my mbp's hard drive. To avoid an absurdly long backup, I did the initial backup via usb (took the better part of the day).
Just now I was excited because it finished - I hooked the drive up to the extreme, mounted the drive so that it would show up as an option in the TM pref pane for a backup disk, and thought I was good to go. However, when I tried to get TM to do a backup so I could see it work (by selecting Back Up Now from the menubar), it took a ridiculously long time "preparing" and I saw that it was trying to create a whole new TM backup on the drive based on my computer's network name. It even had the audacity to think that the previous backup file was ~2gb, which freaked me out because I thought it had deleted it. But sure enough when I canceled the new backup and hooked it up to my mbp again, the backup was the correct size.

Any idea what might be going on here? I didn't run across this issue in any other posts.

TIA

 

[ppc750fx]

Unless I'm mistaken, Time Machine's support for AEBS-connected disks was buggy and disabled by default. If that's the case... uh... well...

Why would you ever use it?

 

[JediMeister]

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2038

 

[rufhausen]

Though Time Machine backups to the Extreme are technically "unsupported", it does work. Maybe TM just got confused when the backup volume was found to be at a different mount point than before and decided to do a "deep traversal" (do a search on that here in the forums and elsewhere) to make sure everything was a-ok before continuing.
I initially tried doing the first backup via USB, then over to AE, ran into similar problems, and just decided to bite the bullet and let it backup overnight and into the next day.
Things seem to be working OK now. It just won't ever be as fast as it would be if you were using USB/firewire.

FYI: The reason I use TM this way instead of a direct USB/FW connection is that I just want one less thing to have to connect to my laptop everytime I bring it back to my office. Same reason I have the printer connected to it.

 

[FortunesFool]

Yeah, I guess I may have to just do the initial backup wirelessly, though I am not looking forward to ~420gb... that's going to take a whole weekend!

I know it works because there are lots of posts about people getting it to work, I just hadn't run across one address this specific issue.

Would there possibly be a way to rename the backup file on the HDD attached to the Extreme to get TM to recognize it?

 

[LouisBlack]

Perform the initial backup connected to the airport with Ethernet. That way you'll have gigabit speeds but the volumes mount point will be the same as when you back up later wirelessly.

 

[RedTomato]

TM stores the backup files in a different format depending on whether it accesses the drive through

i. direct connection (USB or Firewire or internal drive)

OR

ii. network (Wireless or Ethernet)

So the guy above is correct. Connect it via ethernet for the first backup to get the benefit of the high speed gigabit connection. (will still take overnight) Then connect to it via wireless after that.

Might want to exclude some folders from TM too - VMWare, Parallels, Downloads, etc.

 

[rufhausen]

I should have mentioned in my first reply that I'm only backing up via gigabit Ethernet. It still probably took 12 hours or so.

 

[RedTomato]

It just won't ever be as fast as it would be if you were using USB/firewire.

Who cares? It does its thing in the background and never interferes with your work. No need for high speed here if overnight is OK. The only issue is if you ever have to do a full restore in a hurry. But hopefully overnight is OK for a full system restore too.

FYI: The reason I use TM this way instead of a direct USB/FW connection is that I just want one less thing to have to connect to my laptop everytime I bring it back to my office. Same reason I have the printer connected to it.

Exactly. TM via wireless is a win. I bless it each and every day, and I don't miss the bad old days of manual backups and getting stressed over not doing it often enough.

I even bought a second TC for work so as to have backups in two different places. Unfortunately TM doesn't switch between the two automatically.

 

[FortunesFool]

Perform the initial backup connected to the airport with Ethernet. That way you'll have gigabit speeds but the volumes mount point will be the same as when you back up later wirelessly.

Right. Riiiiiiiiigggghhhhhht.

I don't know why I didn't think of this, that's exactly what I'll do. Thanks everyone.

 

[mlts22]

I recommend if you have VMWare or a Windows emulator, put the files for the virtual machine's virtual hard disk in a sparse bundle container. This way instead of Time Machine having to back up the whole file, it just needs to back up the 8MB chunks that changed.