Code Slingin

This Christmas we (my family) decided to provide my dad an infallable backup system for his seemingly fallable PCs.  We learned that he had decided to upgrade to a Mac (a move I strongly encouraged).  So, I had to figure out how to get this NAS device to work with Time Machine over the wireless network.  I read several websites on the subject, but the backup never seemed to be able to complete.  However, I discovered an obscure reference on an apple support forum that resolved my problems.  Below I will detail how I was finally able to get Time Machine to backup to a NAS device.

1. Prepare your NAS device and make sure you can access it
2. Mount your NAS device as a drive
   • From Finder: APPLE + K
   • Server Address: smb://NAS-Device
   • Select which folder you want mounted.  In my case it was called “Back Up”
3. Open up Terminal and Prepare Time Machine to use the network drive mounted above by typing:
   defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
4. Create an empty disk image that will be used on the NAS device to contain your Time Machine backup by typing:
   hdiutil create -library SPUD -megabytes 400000 -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname “backup” “backup.sparsebundle”
   • This creates the empty sparse bundle disk image of a size of 400 Gigabytes
   • It also creates a volume name of “backup” and the file name of “backup.sparsebundle”
5. Move “backup.sparsebundle” to your NAS device location
6. Open up the Console application.  I have yet to figure out a better way to do this, but we have to start a Time Machine backup and let it fail in order to name the “backup.sparsebundle” file that was moved to the NAS device properly because Time Machine is unable to requisition the name properly.  The Console application will contain the appropriate name.
7. Open up your Time Machine Preferences
8. Click “Change Disk” and select your the mounted drive
9. Start a backup (it will fail)
10. In the Console application click on “All Messages”
11. Look for text that reads something like: /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[8818] Creating disk image /Volumes/Backup-1/Joe User’s MacBook Pro 15″_0016cbc9be62.sparsebundle
12. Copy this line to your favorite text editor
13. Go into your NAS device and rename the file to “Joe User’s MacBook Pro 15″_0016cbc9be62.sparsebundle” (replacing it to your exact text…of course <grin>)
14. Stop the backup if you haven’t already or if it hasn’t failed yet
15. Restart the backup
16. You should see Time Machine accepting the sparsebundle and it should properly backup

Some Caveates and cleanup items:

1. It will take a long time for the initial backup to finish, so it’s a good idea to run this over night.
2. The Sparsebundle name must be exactly as you find it in the console.  I’ve not found a better way yet to retrieve the drive name that it is looking for.
3. Delete the original “backup.sparsebundle” file from your local harddrive
4. It may be a good idea to clear the Console logs before starting the Time Machine backup the first time through, it’ll make finding the proper drive name a little easier.
5. If you’ve gone through these steps and it’s still not working reset the Time Machine defaults: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 0. And then go through the steps again.
6. I chose a 400 gig sparsebundle file because the harddrive size was close to 375 gigs.

Hopefully you’ll find as much success as I have with this process.  I’ll be updating this posting soon with actual screenshots to help make it clearer.

James Hawes Mac, OS X, System Administration, Tech Mac, OS X, Time Machine

I ran into an interesting problem today.  My iPhone (version 1) got stuck in headphone mode.  I couldn’t recognize that calls had come through, voice mail was nothing but air, and I couldn’t make calls (or hear that I was indeed connected).

I rebooted several times, went to the apple support site, and couldn’t find a single thing.  So, I turned to Google…

Surprisingly enough, there were thousands of hits!  I started from the top, clicked on the first one, and the incantations I had to go through didn’t help.  I started to work my way down the list which had various modifcations to the same original incantations, chants, mumble, mumble with no luck.  So, I did a reset.

That’s all I needed a simple reset.  I suppose I should have thought about that first, but I was convinced that that wouldn’t work.  It’s a good reminder that the simplest approach is generally the best.

James Hawes Tech, iPhone iPhone