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dangerfish

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 28, 2007
584
133
I was wanting to use a hard drive connected to my iMac as a Time Machine for my MBA for wireless backups. But from what I have been reading, this is not supported although it can be done with some extensive and difficult work arounds (at least for me). Here are some examples of tutorials that I found:
http://code.stephenmorley.org/articles/time-machine-on-a-network-drive/
http://macstuff.beachdogs.org/blog/?p=59
http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu/dav...ct-os-x-lion-time-machine-to-a-network-drive/

I didn't want to go through all the steps listed in the tutorials for fear of messing something up but I did run a Terminal command that seemed to be common to them all:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
This made the drive attached to my iMac available to the MBA when configuring the Time Machine preferences on my MBA. So I allowed it to back up without going through all the other various steps in the tutorials and it seems to have worked. But I can't help but feel like I am missing something. I don't want to assume that it is working properly when in fact it isn't.
If I launch Finder on the MBA, I can select my iMac under Shared and navigate to the external disc and locate a Sparse Disk Image Bundle on that drive with the name of my MBA. When a Time Machine back up starts "Time Machine Backups" will appear under Devices on the MBA and I can see a folder named Backups.backupdb.

So, what do you think? Is it actually backing up? Will I be able to use the back up to restore the MBA in the event it becomes necessary? Any way to know for sure?

Thanks.
 
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