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Time Machine - Will it only work with internal HD's?

aphex

aphex

Moderator<br>All Things Apple
Moderator
I have two main drives I keep my files on;

Internal 160gb
External 250gb Firewire

I currently use a 500gb External USB as a backup for both the internal and firewire but the software i use to backup kinda sucks - iBackup. I've tried others but none work well for backing up the internal and the firewire together.

So my question - finally...

Does Time Machine work with both my Internal and Firewire? Or just the internal?


 
What do you mean by work with?

You can choose what hard drives to backup, and I think you can choose to have an external hard drive backed up as well, but bear in mind that it will fill the space very quickly. So if you have your 160, and the 250, that is 410GB already... so you would only get a couple weeks(tops) worth of backups going on unless you are highly selective about what to backup.

Look at it this way. TimeMachine is great for the internal drive because if that goes out you are severely screwed. I admit that if your external goes out you are screwed, but not as severely. And the only thing that could take out both would also take out your time machine drive (unless things go really well) so.... yes, you should be able to (I haven't specifically tried it) but I am not totally sure why you would want to.
 
Thanks for the info... Well my 160gb internal only has 20-30gb of actual space used. While the 250gb firewire is nearly full, i keep all my photography (80% of the drive) and music (20%) on there. I rarely keep anything except documents and small files on my internal.


 
Does that mean it can back up TO an Airport Disk or that it can backup FROM an Airport Disk? (or both?)
 
Originally posted by: aphex
Does that mean it can back up TO an Airport Disk or that it can backup FROM an Airport Disk? (or both?)
Click to expand...
Officially it can back up from anything HFS+(so internal and external disks, no network disks), to anything that is running Leopard. Unofficially it looks like it should be able to store its backups on to anything that Leopard can write to, including Windows shares (which is why MS wants to tout Windows Home Server as a Time Machine store).
 
Originally posted by: Kaido
It works with anything. Apple said it even works with an Airport Disk.
Click to expand...

Actually, Apple has removed references to the AirPort Disk from its Time Machine web page. Reports were that it worked with early betas of Leopard but not with the most recent builds.

I am guessing it will not work with a USB drive connected to the AE base station. Guess we will find out soon.

-Keith
 
Originally posted by: KeithP
Originally posted by: Kaido
It works with anything. Apple said it even works with an Airport Disk.
Click to expand...

Actually, Apple has removed references to the AirPort Disk from its Time Machine web page. Reports were that it worked with early betas of Leopard but not with the most recent builds.

I am guessing it will not work with a USB drive connected to the AE base station. Guess we will find out soon.

-Keith
Click to expand...

You are right, Engadget confirmed it:

Apple confirmed it: no backing up with Time Machine over the drives you have connected via USB to your Airport Extreme. Also, no Time Machine backups to SMB shares -- AFP network shares only.

Apple said on their Time Machine page before that it would backup to Airport Disk, so this is really crappy of them to pull that feature. One of the primary reasons I bought Leopard was for Time Machine to let me wife back up to our NAS automatically. I'm waiting to see what happens with this...
 
Originally posted by: Kaido
Originally posted by: KeithP
Originally posted by: Kaido
It works with anything. Apple said it even works with an Airport Disk.
Click to expand...

Actually, Apple has removed references to the AirPort Disk from its Time Machine web page. Reports were that it worked with early betas of Leopard but not with the most recent builds.

I am guessing it will not work with a USB drive connected to the AE base station. Guess we will find out soon.

-Keith
Click to expand...

You are right, Engadget confirmed it:

Apple confirmed it: no backing up with Time Machine over the drives you have connected via USB to your Airport Extreme. Also, no Time Machine backups to SMB shares -- AFP network shares only.

Apple said on their Time Machine page before that it would backup to Airport Disk, so this is really crappy of them to pull that feature. One of the primary reasons I bought Leopard was for Time Machine to let me wife back up to our NAS automatically. I'm waiting to see what happens with this...
Click to expand...
That's extremely unfortunate if that's the case and there's no easy workaround. I don't have a NAS/file server that does AFP - in fact the only thing that does that is (*surprise*) Mac OS X. The rest of the world has standardized on SMB, which Mac OS X is perfectly capable of using. This is nothing more than laziness on Apple's part, and is one of the few times I can say I'm disappointed in something they did with Mac OS X.:|
 
Originally posted by: ViRGE
Originally posted by: Kaido
Originally posted by: KeithP
Originally posted by: Kaido
It works with anything. Apple said it even works with an Airport Disk.
Click to expand...

Actually, Apple has removed references to the AirPort Disk from its Time Machine web page. Reports were that it worked with early betas of Leopard but not with the most recent builds.

I am guessing it will not work with a USB drive connected to the AE base station. Guess we will find out soon.

-Keith
Click to expand...

You are right, Engadget confirmed it:

Apple confirmed it: no backing up with Time Machine over the drives you have connected via USB to your Airport Extreme. Also, no Time Machine backups to SMB shares -- AFP network shares only.

Apple said on their Time Machine page before that it would backup to Airport Disk, so this is really crappy of them to pull that feature. One of the primary reasons I bought Leopard was for Time Machine to let me wife back up to our NAS automatically. I'm waiting to see what happens with this...
Click to expand...
That's extremely unfortunate if that's the case and there's no easy workaround. I don't have a NAS/file server that does AFP - in fact the only thing that does that is (*surprise*) Mac OS X. The rest of the world has standardized on SMB, which Mac OS X is perfectly capable of using. This is nothing more than laziness on Apple's part, and is one of the few times I can say I'm disappointed in something they did with Mac OS X.:|
Click to expand...

Yeah what am I supposed to do, carry around a backup drive 24/7 plugged into my laptop? I even purchased an Airport Extreme router, just in case I needed to setup an Airport Disk instead of my using my NAS. My wife and I both have Mac laptops...this is rubbish. They explicitly said on their Leopard website that Time Machine would work with the Airport Disk. Apple has done a lot of crappy things lately...huge iPhone price drop, iMovie 08 with no 3rd-party plugins, no standard NAS backup...grrr...it's the attention to small details like this that made me like Apple a lot in the first place, and now I feel like I'm back to square one 😛
 
i don't see why thats so😛 if its meant mostly for desktop than an external drive is hardly a bother for most people.
if its there constantly logging every change in your system its gotta need a fast interface and storage that it can always rely on
 
Well it only backs up every hour, and you can tell it what to ignore (I wish you could set backup times for specific items, like every week for itunes, every hour (or more frequently) for documents, every day for pictures... that sort of thing) so the first backup takes a while, but subsequent ones, not so much.
 
The fact that the drive must be local and AFP / HFS+ is a *huge* letdown.

/me tries to mount SMB share on WHS and use TM with it ... fails.
/me mounts Apple disk image of 80GB sparse image mounted over SMB ... fails

Damn. This sucks. Do people still use USB drives? Given a modern network ... how quaint. 🙁

Not happy.
 
Originally posted by: dclive
The fact that the drive must be local and AFP / HFS+ is a *huge* letdown.

/me tries to mount SMB share on WHS and use TM with it ... fails.
/me mounts Apple disk image of 80GB sparse image mounted over SMB ... fails

Damn. This sucks. Do people still use USB drives? Given a modern network ... how quaint. 🙁

Not happy.
Click to expand...

Even Apple themselves have a NAS wanna-be, the Airport Disk feature on the Airport Extreme. Sigh, hope this gets updated ASAP...I wonder if they skipped it due to possible lack of complaining about large backups over 10/100...
 
Well this SUCKS if its true - http://discussions.apple.com/t...adID=1199805&tstart=15

Check the last post

From what the local Apple store has said, and from trying to test this at their store, it would appear you can NOT back up an external HD with TM, which is a real road bump for me.

The "System Preferences > Time Machine > Options" allows you to define what you want excluded from TM backup. It doesn't allow you to add a drive, and my external drive didn't show up.

AxL, could you please tell me if you see your external drive in the Options window mentioned above. This was not the case at the Apple Store.

I do not have 10.5 installed at home, yet. This is one of the reasons why I haven't purchased it already.
Click to expand...

Could the drive possibly not have been HFS+ formatted?
 
I don't believe it is possible to backup an external through Time Machine - at least not yet.

Neither of my external FW800 disks (both HFS+) are available to backup.
 
Hmm I discovered that Apple's Personal File Sharing system is just another name for AFP, which FreeNAS has built-in. I'll test this when I get Leopard in and let you guys know if it works or not. There's hope yet!
 
Just an update, Time Machine works great with my External FW drive - backing everything up to USB
 
no update, i think the drive just has to be Mas OS Extended (Journaled)
 
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