Time Machine on a Freecom SilverStore NAS for several users?

[eerola]

All tips, tricks and best practices around Time Machine on Freecom SilverStore 2-Drive NAS will be appreciated... How can I enable Time Machine for several users on a Freecom SilverStore NAS?

I used to have a Buffalo TeraStation TS-HTGL/R5, where I had shares for several users, and which worked reasonably OK even as a "Time Capsule" until Mac OS X Lion. My Time Machine configuration was based on the Mactimes instructions:

http://www.mactimes.info/2009/05/how-to-use-time-machine-with-buffalo.html

Because Buffalo was not able to solve the incompatibility issues with Lion and newer, I started looking for a solution, which would support

* Time Machine backups

* Network shares

for several users. My users have

a. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard,

b. Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and

c. Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

I bought a Freecom SilverStore 2-Drive NAS (Firmeware 2001.3101) and some hard disks because I noticed that the SilverStore was advertised on the Freecom web site as a business-oriented NAS drive, and it has a support for Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, and it was

I have been using Buffalo TeraStation to Time Machine before, but because they do not really support Mac OS X, I wanted a solution where I get the Mac OS X support.

Unfortunately, the Time Machine instructions in the Freecom SilverStore 2-Drive NAS User Manual are quite limited:

http://www.freecom.com/files/Produc...upport/Manuals/SilverStore_User_Manual_EN.pdf

Based on the User Manual, I understand that all my Users should use SilverStore-Backup when doing a Time Machine backup onto the Freecom SilverStore 2-Drive NAS. I also understand that all users should be using user name “timemachineuser” to access the Time Machine service.

I see that this configuration offers an easy getting started for an individual user, but how should I configure my system for several users?

1. I do not want my users to have access to each others' backups. If they all access the system as “timemachineuser” and a shared password, they can access and mess each others' backups.

2. SilverStore-Backup shows the entire physical Volume would be available for Time Machine. I would like to have a quota (max 250GB) for each user, and set a limit to the disk usage of Time Machine so that Time Machine backups will not eat the space, which I have designed for the network folders.

I tried to achieve my goal using above linked TeraStation trick and adapting it to the Freecom. That would have allowed me to do the Time Machines onto user-specific shares. Then setting access rights and quotas would have been easy. Unfortunately, this did not provide a better solution than the Buffalo: Time Machine (tested on my own Mac OS X 10.7.4 Lion) says that the share on the Freecom does not support all required AFP commands. This happens even if the manufacturer pages promise AFP support, and I have Apple Network enabled for the Share on the SilverStore NAS, and I have placed a pre-generated sparsebundle on the share.

 

[eerola]

I tried several setups and I think I might have now an idea about Freecom's logic:

Usernames are used to configure access to "regular" shares. If you specify a quota for a user, that is a "global quota" which sums up the combined capacity used by the user on the entire NAS.

Time Machine use seems to rely on a shared user name and password. Here Freecom asks us to trust other users of the service and Mac OS X's ability not to mix Time Machine sparsebundles.

You can specify a quota also for "timemachineuser". Setting this seems to enable limiting the capacity, which the Time Machine service can take.

AFP shares can be seen in the Time Machinessa as possible backup targets, but Lion and newer cannot do a backup on them. The SilverStore-Backup seems to be somehow different, because Lion can Time Machine backup there without problems.

If I want to offer my users two shared folders: One which is a workgroup share and another which is his personal folder, and set a 10GB quota for the personal data storage, that cannot be done. The 10GB quota is "global" and if the user saves 9GB of work data into the workgroup folder, he will have 1GB left for his private data. As far as I can see, I need to create two separate user names for my user and link one to the workgroup share and the other to his personal folder (and set the quota for the latter one).

So, I configured my SilverStore as follows:

I created personal folders and workgroup folders for my users without quota limitations. I granted access rights to the folders using Groups. Admin got Full access to all folders. For "timemachineuser" I set a 1000GB quota (3x 250GB + some buffer). So far, this configuration seems to work reasonably OK.