Time Machine with network drive

[nomad6]

First time poster, long time mac user
I spoke with a senior product rep through apple care and they told me it was possible to use a network drive as the drive of choice for time machine. Since we can not (yet) use an AEBS drive for that (until they sell enough time capsules) I have opted to hook up the drive to my mini, partition it for each mac to use half for their own time machine files, and use the hd as a network drive. Now, Mr senior product rep would not tell me how to get time machine to use a network drive. So with a little looking i found a simple command line to put in Terminal and supposedly, ta-da, its supposed to work. Well guess what, ta-da, it doesnt. i got some error message back saying some argument took place. i have tried whatever little trouble shooting i know of, i.e. make suring TM was shut down while in Terminal then starting it up, no luck, and toggling on and off the shares for the hd file. still no luck. any help is appreciated and here is the command line i tried in terminal:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

 

[jeremy.king]

what protocol did you use to connect to the drive? I wonder if this comes into play.

 

[ChrisA]

any help is appreciated and here is the command line i tried in terminal:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

First rule: Never, never type commands into the terminal unless you understand what you are doing. The first step is to research the command. Bring up the terminal and type "man defaults" to print a copy of the manual page for the defaults command. Read it end to end. It gives the proper syntax for the defaults write command. You will likely have to run it from an admin account too.

You do not have to partition the drive with a partition for each computer. Time Machine will keep each machine's data in a folder where the folder name is the machine name. Looks like Apple already thought about using one drive for multiple macs.

 

[jeffmc]

First rule: Never, never type commands into the terminal unless you understand what you are doing..

you can't do too much damage unintentionally without knowing anything, you have to know more to do damage actually.

 

[jeremy.king]

First rule: Never, never type commands into the terminal unless you understand what you are doing.

This is a very good rule to follow, however in this case, he didn't do anything wrong.

you can't do too much damage unintentionally without knowing anything, you have to know more to do damage actually.

I disagree.

The reality is that this method of getting network volumes to work with Time Machine is unreliable, at best. Some people are reporting success, while others - such as the OP - are not as blessed. Apple seems to be restricting network volumes as Time Machine backup targets based on some information with how the device is connected (protocol? Special file on the drive? etc) and it probably won't take very long for those with more skills than I to reverse engineer what that triggering factor is that makes the machine into thinking its talking to a Time Capsule. For this to be done, however, we actually Time Capsules to start shipping.

 

[nomad6]

figured it out

so after playing with it for a while, i now have time machine in sync with the network drive. but, when i disconnect from the network, ie. go to school, work, etc. i have a hard time getting the volume to show back up under shared and time machine cant locate it's file on the drive when i reconnect, i get error code -6580

 

[TommyLee]

more ram.