Time Machine via NAS drive

[daveishere]

Hi Guys,

Hoping for a little advice from you guys on here.

Basically, i'm looking to setup a NAS drive on my home LAN in order to backup my iMac and my MacBook Air.

I have an old 1TB SATA drive, and have found a cheap NAS enclosure on eBay.

I'd like to put the two together and plug it in to my router so I can map network drives on both Mac's and back them up via Time Machine.

I'm assuming ill need some kind of software to be installed on the drive in order to manage it/give it an IP address etc?

Does anyone have any recommendations for some cheap/free NAS software that works well with Time Machine?

Many thanks in advance!

 

[Bear]

If it's a NAS enclosure, it should have the firmware in it. What you need is the information on how to set up the NAS unit. That is probably via a web browser and would require no software to be installed. If it needs software, you would need the software from the enclosure manufacturer.

 

[Namtaro]

The NAS has to support AFP in order for timemachine to natively support it.

There are two ways I know or to bypass timemachine. The first method involves tricking timemachine to think a sparse bundle on anydrive is a supported drive which is in the link below. The downside is that you have to mount the drive yourself every time you want to back it up and it doesn't work for restoring a new Mac.
The other way is the one I'm using and it involves creating a time capsule server in a virtual machine on Debian. Involves a bit of work and you need a separate computer/server for it to work, but you don't need to trick the Mac at all, works exactly like a real time capsule.
Here's the link for that :
http://www.nasreview.com/nas/nas-howto/31609-how-to-make-a-windows-time-machine-server-part-1