Simon

November 15, 2007 at 9:30 am

You’re done. Sorry, very pedantic. This is a great tip, many thanks!

Simon

November 16, 2007 at 3:27 am

This works fantastically well. You have no idea how happy you’ve made me :o)

Oscar

November 23, 2007 at 9:14 am

Hi
Question, If my profile is using FileVault. I understand that I’m supposed to be logged out for TM to back up my profile. If I’m logged out. would the network drive disconnect? I’m using JungleDisk from Amazon.

Thanks.

Oscar.

Peter

November 24, 2007 at 6:30 am

I’m using a MacBook Pro so your solution seemed like a good idea. Time Machine seemed to run fine but never finished. The progress bar was all the way to the right and said “Backing up 821.1 MB of 821.1 MB. Backing up in progress.” I know that what was actually sent was more like 60 GB, so I don’t know what this 821 MB turkey bone was that TM was choking on. I let it cook all night during which my Windows XP virus checker (F-Prot) on the destination machine upstairs *quarantined* the backup folder!! (I’ll send F-Prot an e-mail about that.) So Time Machine is shut off for now; there’s nothing really mission critical on this laptop. When I tried to stop Time Machine, the system preferences was not responding and would not allow a Force Quit, so I had to crash the laptop and shut off TM when the computer came back up.

Your solution works great; I think Time Machine itself needs better understanding of working across a network, perhaps, especially via Samba to a non-Mac machine. I Have an Airport Extreme router with the USB port on the back; I could try dedicating a hard drive attached there, possibly beyond the scan of the Windows virus-checker, if I don’t use that drive in conjunction with any of the Windows machines.

Sorry for the long post; I tried to be precise.

Glenn

December 2, 2007 at 11:21 pm

This is great information. I’ve just purchased an Iomega Home Network Hard Drive (500GB) to use primarily as a Time Machine backup destination for a couple of MacBook Pros. In setting it up, I had no trouble getting the drive up on my net, and connected to it. I made the OS modification which you recommended, and set up Time Machine to use that SMB share. Time Machine *did* create my sparsebundle folder, but it fails as soon as it starts to try and do a backup, saying “The backup disk image could not be mounted”. Any thoughts or suggestions would be very much appreciated!

GreatWork

December 7, 2007 at 12:41 pm

Great tip, works perfectly with a shared firewire drive attached to another mac on my network.

Thanks!

Andrew

December 12, 2007 at 1:20 am

Hey George. Thanks for this awesome tip. I was wondering if you could help me out with something. I backed up a drive (name is ‘OI’) with Time Machine to a networked drive with no problems. Recently I had to reinstall 10.5 and I was wondering what I have to do do restore the drive named ‘OI’ using Time Machine.

Jeremy

December 12, 2007 at 11:19 pm

For the guy who wants to know how to do a full restore from a Time Machine backup: try Migration Assistant, located in the Applications/Utilities folder. It asks where you want to “migrate” from, including a Time Machine backup. Worked great for me!

Rok

December 17, 2007 at 8:09 am

Does it work if my shared disk is NTFS type and it runs on Windows XP?

Aric Friesen

December 27, 2007 at 8:02 am

Just for the record, I didn’t have to do this to make my network share show up. It was available in the dialog without doing anything special.

Adam

January 7, 2008 at 6:13 am

George,
I tried your method for setting up Time Machine and it worked great at first but any time I’ve restarted my laptop, Time Machine can no longer find the network drive and I must turn Time Machine off, re-enter the command in Terminal, and then reactivate Time Machine. Any suggestions? Thanks

Aaron

January 22, 2008 at 6:59 am

George - I was wondering if you could post a detailed explanation of how to set up an AFP server… I have an 500GB hard drive and a wireless router and would like to do this but don’t know how to get to the point where your instructions start. Thanks so much!

Siena

January 28, 2008 at 1:30 pm

I was wondering if you knew if it was possible to have time machine on my mac back up a folder on my network, sort of the reverse of this post.

rene

January 30, 2008 at 10:09 am

I’m backing up to an SMB drive attached to a PC connected to my home network. I had a similar problem to the one described by Glenn: At first Time Machine worked fine, but after fiddling [changing properties from the PC] with the drive, Time Machine would fail with this error: “The backup disk image could not be mounted”.

I solved the problem by deleting hidden files on the drive (files initially written by Time Machine). It now works like a charm!

Doug

February 12, 2008 at 10:11 am

I too would like to use Time Machine on router attached HFS hard drive. If that’s possible, could you offer suggestions on how that could be done?

alf

February 13, 2008 at 1:32 am

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This work fine before I upraded to 10.5.2

Any Ideas??

André

February 13, 2008 at 8:40 am

Greetings,
I was using this fantastic hint with no problems whatsoever, until the 10.5.2 Leopard update. Now, Time Machine can find the drive, but I get the error message: “Time Machine Error - The backup disk image could not be created.”
Anyone else experiencing this or have any insight as to how I can remedy this situation? Time Machine backs up fine when the external drive is plugged into my computer, but won’t work over the network anymore.
Thanks.

Ian

February 13, 2008 at 1:40 pm

I too was having problems with TM on 10.5.2 backing up to a network drive. But try this if you can…
Run Time Machine on a local drive, firewire / usb, copy the sparsebundle file over to the network drive - this is the file TM is finding hard to write first off - once their, TM seems to run fine. Good luck !

Robert F.

February 15, 2008 at 1:21 pm

In response to backing up to an NTFS drive (1 year late, since I only just discovered this article), I believe you may be able to do it via MacFUSE and installing NTFS-3g (gives OS X NTFS r/w capabilities), located here:

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/ntfs-3g

You can mount the shared NTFS folder/drive as a network sharepoint, at which point I believe Time Machine will be able to see it.

It should be noted, however, that NTFS is a proprietary file system unsupported by Apple. 3G is the product of reverse engineering the NTFS file system, and therefore data written to it outside of a Windows environment will make your data more susceptible to corruption than by backing up to a supported HFS, UFS, or FAT formatted volume — which sort of defeats the whole purpose of backing up your files.

jshell

February 15, 2008 at 8:39 pm

I’m having an issue with TM and 10.5.2. Before 10.5.2 I was able to create a backup over my network, but not anymore. It just craps out at about 110MB. So, I rebuilt my machine (it was needed). I created a network backup under 10.5.1 - no problems. Then I applied the 10.5.2 update. I could still backup to the original network file created under .1. But then I deleted it and tried to start a new backup from scratch. Same problem as before I rebuilt the machine, the network backup file gets to about 110MB and then gives me a failed message. I switched from Windows recently, but I have to say that Apple has plenty of its own issues, and just as proprietary as MS. I mean come on, the cost for Time Capsule is way too much considering many people already have a NAS or linux box running that would work just as well as TC.

Csabi

February 17, 2008 at 10:34 am

Hello!

Is it possible to do the same thing you did, but with an external drive that is connected to a wireless router via an USB port?

(the external hdd is a WD MyBook 320 GB and the router is an ASUS WL-500G Premium)

Thanks.

Cary

February 19, 2008 at 2:39 pm

What is the command that you are using to mount the SMB/APF shared that is located on your network?

Thanks,

gf

February 19, 2008 at 8:20 pm

I use a workflow to auto connect to the samba share on startup. I’m using Administrator credentials on my xp machine to do so, connecting to smb:///

10.5.2, same error as others: “Time Machine Error - The backup disk image could not be created.”

Thanks jshell for the good troubleshooting, I’ll try making the initial backup on a usb drive first, then copying it to the network share. Good call on setting up a quota too, thanks all.

laura

February 20, 2008 at 7:21 pm

Um, I’m not sure how I found you - and this advice - but after spending quite some time trying to find something on using Time Machine on a network share, there you were.

Thank you! I’m backing up my Mac Pro Tower to my new ethernet connected Drobo. Fabulous.

Take the rest of the week off!

laura

February 20, 2008 at 8:41 pm

Well, I spoke too soon. It starts to backup - and create the .sparsebundle file you mention, but then the backup fails, citing no mountable file systems. Have you seen this?

Thanks!

John Nicita

February 22, 2008 at 12:18 pm

(some background)-
I originally used the defaults write 1 command to allow smb disks to be seen, then discovered iTimeMachine (just a little application that does it for you).

I have 10 terabytes or so of SMB network disk, there is no way its fair for my 300gb MacPro to continue to eat up disk space (I guess I could admin quote my folder, but that would still eat up to all I can use) so I followed the web posted procedures of creating the sparseimage bundle with a 350gb max size, then used hdiutil to convert the sparseimage to a sparsebundle. I then used time machine to connect to the smb drive by simply turning it on, and letting it do one write, I then turned it off. I then took my 350gb maxsize bundle and renamed it exactly what timemachine created on my network drive (after deleting it of course).

For 2 months I had the system running, gradually creeping to my 350gb mark, when it got there, it successfully started pruning older copies and creating disk space for itself within the sparsebundle, then mysteriously, 68 days or so into it, Time Machine claims that it cant mount the image anymore (no suitable file system.

I redid the whole procedure, but this time got about 15 days of time machine and then the cant mount the image message again.

Something weird is happening, and I wouldn’t trust SMB time machine backups moving forward. Anyone else got any experience in this realm?

Not sure if this is the same thing happening to others here, their posts lead one to assume that it never works from the start, rather than mine where I get 65 days or so then 15 days.

Thanks

Chris

February 24, 2008 at 12:08 pm

I agree with others that I had no problems, while being slow over an 802.11b network, when first backing up to my WD MyBook connected to my old PBG4 until the 10.5.2 update. For me, updates did continue to hang around 110MB so I decided to reformat the entire drive. Now, using TinkerTool, I can see the sparsebundle folder being created and growing in size, but it also fails and displays the message “the backup disk image could not be mounted.”

I agree also with jshell that we shouldn’t be forced to buy Time Capsule just to use this functionality. For me, I am not worried about speed or frequency of my backups as I am rather casual user and am just being proactive in the event my drive does fail before its expected.

Chris

February 24, 2008 at 4:54 pm

I found this website earlier with a take on how to fix this issue in 10.5.2, but it’s not something I’m really game to try at my need for backups. Would love others experiences.

http://pastebin.com/f47499d34

Some Mac Kid

February 24, 2008 at 6:02 pm

hey i think i have a more simple solution. this seemed to work for me.
i did this using my MBP over the net to my XP machine
this may sound crazy but i started the time machine backup and looked in the folder it was doing the backup to and it had created folder called Macbook Pro_001b63a53201.sparsbundle when it got to 113MB right before it gave me the error on the mac telling me it couldnt create it i copied then after it gave me the error on the mac it deleted it by itself so i pasted it back off my clipboard started time machine backup again and it worked.

i hope that makes sense cuz its doing the backup now and it hasnt given me any errors yet. and if you do that as your reading it i think it makes more sense. hope it works leave a post if you try it. as far as i can tell you have nothing to lose.
so yea.

CEE

February 25, 2008 at 12:16 pm

I give up tried. Tried everything :(. How do I remove the script?

Pete

February 26, 2008 at 12:54 pm

If you want to do a full restore from a Time Machine backup you just insert your OS X 10.5 install disc and when you get to the point where you would normally choose to install OS X, go to the toolbar at the top of the screen and look for the menu titled utilities if I remember correctly (I remember its the one furthest to the right). Then you can simply choose to restore from a time machine backup. I did this about a week ago and it worked flawlessly now my macbook is in the exact state it was before my 10.5.2 update stalled in the middle of updating.

Troy

February 26, 2008 at 3:57 pm

This works great, thanks for the tip. Why can’t Apple support this? It is the way it should work!

Thanks,
Troy

Chris

February 26, 2008 at 5:27 pm

I tried Some Mac Kid’s idea, but the sparsebundle is erased before I can click on it to copy. Mine gets to around 157MB then errors.

Any other thoughts?

JD

February 28, 2008 at 7:40 am

Hi I am getting the following error from the time machine -
Time Machine Error
The backup disk image could not be created

Please suggest

JD

JD

February 28, 2008 at 8:15 am

Hi I am getting the following error from the time machine -
Time Machine Error
The backup disk image could not be created

I am using AFP

Please suggest

JD

Elaine

February 29, 2008 at 5:19 pm

I have a very basic Time Machine Question question?
Once Time Machine is installed, should the external backup drive be left on and connected all the time, even overnight when my computer is sleeping?

Andy

February 29, 2008 at 7:38 pm

Hi George. I typed your code in Terminal, and my time machine has connected to the hard drive on the network..although it can’t make a back. All it says is “The backup disk image could not be created.”

Could you please give me a suggestion?

NSLU2 und Mac OS X » macophilia

March 1, 2008 at 7:15 am

[...] Imulus.net). Schon kann man das Laufwerk als Time Machine-Volume wählen. Anscheinend funktioniert das [...]

Sergio

March 2, 2008 at 8:30 pm

It didn’t work for me. I can’t connect using afp.

Can someone tell me how to reverse the changes that I made?
” defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 ”

How do I put it back to the defaults?

Thanks

Dave

March 4, 2008 at 8:30 am

Works great. Thank you!!

James

March 4, 2008 at 5:03 pm

What file format does the network drive have to be. I tried mscos journaled. and it failed.

Keith

March 4, 2008 at 11:29 pm

I was having the issue where the disk image could not be created. I’m using 10.5.2. I followed these instructions: http://www.flokru.org/2008/02/.....n-leopard/

Except I did not create the image on my local machine, I just created it directly to my network SMB share and I let disk utility keep the .dmg extension on the image it creates.

My TM backup is going now. I only got my Mac a few days ago (just switched from Windows!). I hope this works because this is one feature that I really wanted when I switched. I am so shocked that SMB and other network drives are not supported for backing up. Then again, Apple came out with time capsule and I know they would like to drain my bank account some more.

Chris

March 5, 2008 at 1:20 am

Wondering why my comments where I got the thought of copying the sparsebundle image from the drive being backed up to before it was erased as per the moderator’s notification I was given. It works, but you do have to grab the image from a fast network or get on the “server” (in my case, an old PBG4) to grab it before TM deletes it.

Hope others have had better results. It appears “George” is away or my findings would have been posted over a week ago.

Tdot

March 5, 2008 at 6:52 pm

This is great, just what i needed!!! After applying that script, I can now also add music files from the network to my iTunes library.
Tdot

ryan

March 5, 2008 at 6:53 pm

Hey, this solution works for a shared external HD connected to my desktop PC on my network. Thanks for the tip!

Phil

March 20, 2008 at 9:41 am

George,

Reference the below:

I suspect that the problem is you are using an SMB share rather then AFP. I know on my end here I’m using an AFP share. I would suspect, (I don’t know for certain) that the SMB format is not what Time Machine is looking for. Can you try this on a AFP share and tell me if it works differently?

I have an AFP mount (PC network hard drive) and I’m having the same error message, saying “The backup disk image could not be created”, even though Time Machine *did* create my sparsebundle folder. For me, too, it fails as soon as it starts to try and do a backup.

Any ideas?

Stony Grunow

March 24, 2008 at 8:21 pm

I setup an Ubuntu box using AFP to act as a network-capable Time Machine server for the several Apple Laptops in my house. So far, it’s working well. I have all the steps at http://www.myhovercraftisfullo.....ne-backup/
if people want to use that. Good Luck!

André

March 24, 2008 at 11:05 pm

So now that Apple has included the functionality of backing up via TM on a networked drive (can I get an “Amen”?!), do we need to undo the initial “defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1″ workaround?

André

March 25, 2008 at 1:54 am

Having updated Airport and TM, I bit the bullet and tried the undo code:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 0

Time Machine still found my drive on the network and all is hunky-dory, so far. I’ll update if things end up differently. Wish me luck!

Humberto Diógenes

March 27, 2008 at 1:10 pm

That’s just what I was looking for! Thanks!
I haven’t tried actually backing up the data yet, but it surely shows way more volumes now.
It would be cool if you updated the article with some concise information about problems of backing up in, say, Samba shares.

rumpole

March 31, 2008 at 6:54 pm

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for PC-formatted drives. Any suggestions for backup software that would let me do this over a network? (Freeware preferred). I can shell out the $ for retrospect, but would rather not.

Garry

April 3, 2008 at 6:24 am

Does this work on a Windows network NTFS formated drive?

tux

April 13, 2008 at 11:11 am

Check this out for Linux users:

http://linux.dantux.com/forum/index.php?topic=3.0

Andrew Bavetta

April 14, 2008 at 9:39 am

Your solution works great! Thanks a lot! Suggest you put a link to your solution on the Apple support website.
Andy

Macbook
Linkstation Network Drive
Airport Extreme 802.11n Router

drkib

April 23, 2008 at 4:31 pm

I tried this method, using an intel macbook. The back up destination is a Buffalo LinkStation network storage device which is connected to the network through my wireless broadband router (netgear). All devices work ok with PC an Mac ( I have both) I can read, write and delete files/folders using mac on the LinkStation.

I was previously using SmartSync Pro to back up Windows machines to this LinkStation, didn’t have any problems (one of the few times when I didnt have a problem with Windows!)

After following your instructions, I found that this error message keeps coming up every time Time Machine attempted its first backup:

Time Machine error

The backup disk image could not be created.

Does anyone know how to resolve this?

Michael

May 19, 2008 at 10:05 pm

You are the best!!!

Cheers,

andrew

May 24, 2008 at 9:20 pm

Thanks! Perfect fix

Rayplay

June 9, 2008 at 5:29 am

Hi!

nicely laid out guide you have. I did practically the same thing as you except my file share is on a local network; i’m using my pc via my network as a time machine backup. the problem is that Tm recognises the mounted drive but is unable to backup to it. I used the os x 86 install disc to partition my PC HD into a mac os x extended journal’d thinking that this would rectify the problem but now the partition is unreachable on the network because my PC cannot read the partition and thus cannot actually share it!

I’m a bit of a noob in these regards but have done a pretty extensive amount of googling and can’t see an obvious fix.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Ray

Elaine

July 4, 2008 at 11:34 am

Problem - I connected my new 1TB Time Capsule to my Mac G4 (using Leopard Version 10.5.3) and set up a new wireless network. I backed up my hard drive using an ethernet connection without apparent problems, and then realised that the network name (default) was my full name.

Not wanting my full name available for view to everyone with the area, I went into the Time Capsule set-up to change the name of the wireless connection. I completed the set-up and now notice that the original backup is not visible. The number of available bytes on the Time Capsule has been reduced by the size of the original Backup (69 GB) but I am unable to find the file.

I did a second full backup using the new network name I had created and I have a new backup file. Could I have accidentally partitioned the Time Capsule by changing the network connection. If the 69 GB are shown as unavailable, shouldn’t the file be there?

I hope you can help me with this problem. Thanks

noppo

July 11, 2008 at 12:21 am

I’ve using MacOSX 10.5.4 the time machine interface has change.
And I have done all you said.
I found no any server HD.

Any information?

Rolf

August 30, 2008 at 1:21 pm

Hello George,

thanks for the great info.

I’m running into the same problem like many others: “The backup disk image could not be created”
I’m running 10.5.4

Any ideas what this could be?
I do see the network drive via network, TM sees the drive to but just can’t create the image.
I’m so frustrated as I spent almost 6 hours with no success, I hope you can help me.
Thanks
R

SigmaLab » Blog Archive » Leopard Time Machine su condivisione di rete

October 7, 2008 at 10:25 am

[...] invece da terabyte è facile trovarne cosi come schede di rete gigabit! Come si fa? Io ho seguito questo tutorial. Di fatto basta solamente digitare dal terminale defaults write [...]

Greg Hostetler

October 10, 2008 at 10:23 pm

For those of you still getting the error:

“Time Machine Error - The backup disk image could not be created.”

Checkout this page for some advice on how to correct it.

http://www.macosxhints.com/art.....0211034137

Matt

December 28, 2008 at 10:53 am

Brilliant. I love you! Works swimmingly.