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Leopard 10.5.2, Airport EXTREME and Time Machine

Jan 23, 2008 | Comment | Tags: apple

[edit] D’oh! I meant Extreme, not Express. Old habits die hard…

For the past few days I’ve been tinkering with making Time Machine backup to a hard drive connected to an Airport Extreme, based on questions posed by some features found in Leopard 10.5.2.

The Airport Extreme attached drive consistently mounts and is easily written to and read from, but after choosing it as the backup location in Time Machine, it simply won’t work no matter how loud I curse at it.

Below are a few lines from the Console detailing the actions of the system when the backup begins and as it fails.

Jan 23 20:47:27 sm /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[547]: Backup requested by user
Jan 23 20:47:27 sm /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[547]: Starting standard backup
Jan 23 20:47:28 sm /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[547]: Creating disk image /Volumes/wd/sm_001b63b0891d.sparsebundle
Jan 23 20:48:11 sm kernel[0]: hfs: Initializing the journal (joffset 0×747000 sz 0×1800000)…
Jan 23 20:48:47 sm /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[547]: Backup requested due to disk attach
Jan 23 20:48:50 sm /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[547]: Error 22 creating backup disk image
Jan 23 20:48:50 sm /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[547]: Failed to create disk image
Jan 23 20:48:50 sm /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[547]: Backup failed with error: 20

For testing purposes, I had done the following:

tested using both fat32 and journaled partitions on a 250gb drive
partitioned and formatted the drive as journaled, guid, single partition
tested the backup locally using Time Machine – this worked
reset the Airport, rebooted the computer
attempted to use Time Machine on the mounted Airport partition

A few notes:

when using the drive locally, Time Machine creates a ‘Backups.backupdb’ folder and starts writing the files
when using the drive via Airport, it attempts to create (as seen above), a sparse disk image, as if it were a normal network drive
testing was performed on a Western Digital 250gb Passport and an Iomega 1tb disk
testing Time Machine to a Windows based share also failed with the same error as the Airport

So, sadly, this leaves us in the same boat we were a few days ago. Hopefully it’s just a switch that needs to be flipped when the update is released, or perhaps we’ll see the ability to use Time Machine with network/Airport disks available as a paid upgrade (a la Touch apps).

BabyGotMac recommends Parallels Desktop for Mac

Technorati Tags: airport, apple, express, hardware, network, time machine

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br

Did you try doing the first backup locally and then hooking the machine up via the network share (Airport Extreme) to do subsequent backups?

Sam Rothenberg

I've been using Time Machine with my AirDisk via the Terminal hack smoothly for a few months now. Like on your machine it began by creating a sparse disk image in the root directory of the AirDisk (named by my computer's shared name and its AirPort address). Yours seems to be failing at creating the disk image. Try fixing it by using Disk Utility to manually create a sparse disk image named sm_001b63b0891d.sparsebundle on the drive before selecting it as your backup volume.

B

don't you think they just did this on purpose to sell time capsule to people who already have airport extremes? If it works with time capsule, I see no reason why it shouldn't work with airport extreme.

mattyohe

"perhaps we’ll see the ability to use Time Machine with network/Airport disks"

Are you implying that network Time Machine backups are not working properly in 10.5.2? Or just that Air Disks still do not work?

ScottMac

Did you try doing the first backup locally and then hooking the machine up via the network share (Airport Extreme) to do subsequent backups?

Yes, with no success.

I’ve been using Time Machine with my AirDisk via the Terminal hack smoothly for a few months now. Like on your machine it began by creating a sparse disk image in the root directory of the AirDisk (named by my computer’s shared name and its AirPort address). Yours seems to be failing at creating the disk image. Try fixing it by using Disk Utility to manually create a sparse disk image named sm_001b63b0891d.sparsebundle on the drive before selecting it as your backup volume.

Hmm. Interesting, I'll give that a shot and report back.

don’t you think they just did this on purpose to sell time capsule to people who already have airport extremes? If it works with time capsule, I see no reason why it shouldn’t work with airport extreme.

I do think it was some clever marketing to make Time Capsule seem more attractive. They underestimate the Mac nerd market though.
:)

“perhaps we’ll see the ability to use Time Machine with network/Airport disks”

Are you implying that network Time Machine backups are not working properly in 10.5.2? Or just that Air Disks still do not work?

Both?

shaggymac

The real issue is the firmware on the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule.

AirPort Extreme doesn't support all the necessary back end components that Time Capsule supports.

I do expect an AirPort Extreme update coming soon... not sure how soon!

mattyohe

Both?

Okay, well then you are saying that Apple has broken network backups from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2, which I don't believe.

10.5.1 currently supports using another Leopard machine with an AFP sharepoint as a Time Machine backup location. Without any hacks, you can setup a share on any Leopard machine and mount that share with another Leopard machine and use that to backup to.

There is this big confusion that network Time Machine backup is broken in 10.5.1. It isn't.

ScottMac

Hi Mattyohe.

I'll have to check on another machine tonight, but I seem to recall that the only way to backup to a shared drive is with a hack (either this line: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 or a method like this one: http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2007/10/12595/ ).

Again, not positive and can't test right now, but it almost certainly doesn't work 'out of the box'. Are you sure you didn't use an app like iTimeMachine at some point?

MattB

I've current got TimeMachine backing up to a 500GB MyBook hanging off the back of a G4 PowerMac running 10.5 Server. I shared the drive and marked it as a TimeMachine destination and it just showed up as an available disk to all m other Macs. I'm running 10.5.1 on all machines.

mattyohe

Hi Mattyohe.
I’ll have to check on another machine tonight, but I seem to recall that the only way to backup to a shared drive is with a hack (either this line: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 or a method like this one: http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2007/10/12595/ ).
Again, not positive and can’t test right now, but it almost certainly doesn’t work ‘out of the box’. Are you sure you didn’t use an app like iTimeMachine at some point?

100% sure no hacks took place.

In 10.5.0, if the volume you were backing up to wasn't as large or larger than the volume, Time Machine would complain that there wasn't enough space. Now in 10.5.1, you can use Time Machine to backup the current data to a drive if the data currently on the volume you want to backup, is less than the volume you are backing up to.

What's more, is that Time Machine also respects quotas. I have setup a 10.5.1 client with a couple sharepoints, and multiple users with quotas on that volume, then if a machine wants to use a sharepoint as their backup, it will do so, up to the quota that I defined.

MacGeek

Have you tried an AFP partition map instead of GUID? That's how I formatted my drives (Iomega eGo, attached to the AirPort, Iomega StorCenter via Ethernet as both an AFP and a SMB mount). Works great to both.

othermacdude

Both?

Okay, well then you are saying that Apple has broken network backups from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2, which I don’t believe.
10.5.1 currently supports using another Leopard machine with an AFP sharepoint as a Time Machine backup location. Without any hacks, you can setup a share on any Leopard machine and mount that share with another Leopard machine and use that to backup to.
There is this big confusion that network Time Machine backup is broken in 10.5.1. It isn’t.

I don't think anyone is saying that network backups are broken in 10.5.1 as they are not, there is a document on the apple site about it detailing what is required for it to work.

What is broken that was in the Leopard GM is backup to NAS (AFP/FAT/SMB/HFS, whatever) and none Leopard hosted network drives, like windows servers at the office mounted over SMB. If you want to do network backups in 10.5.1, it has to be to another Mac running Leopard or Leopard Server.

This is where the confusion lies, in the definition of network drives.

Jeff Brown

I had a similar problem, but it was because I did the original backup with the disk attached to my MacBook's USB port, and then attached the drive to my desktop and tried to do a remote backup. Got the whole "not enough room" thing. So I wiped the drive, attached it to the desktop(it's a SATA drive, so I just wired it straight to the board), and started fresh with a completely new Time Machine backup of the MacBook, and it worked just fine. I get the same spdi on my remote drive itself, but when I do backups/restores(I haven't hammered on it, but I did throw a few things in the trash & bring them back and also it appears to be updating regularly), a disk image mounts on my local machine that shows up with the ‘Backups.backupdb’ folder.

It is godawful slow(~5 hrs to do the initial 80GB of backup), but the fact that it will regularly update without having a dangling USB anchor on it works great.

Blake

I’ve been using Time Machine with my AirDisk via the Terminal hack smoothly for a few months now. Like on your machine it began by creating a sparse disk image in the root directory of the AirDisk (named by my computer’s shared name and its AirPort address). Yours seems to be failing at creating the disk image. Try fixing it by using Disk Utility to manually create a sparse disk image named sm_001b63b0891d.sparsebundle on the drive before selecting it as your backup volume.

Hmm. Interesting, I’ll give that a shot and report back.

I would love to see if you have any luck with this. I've hacked my setup and I still have absolutely no luck getting Time Machine to work with an AirDisk at all.

David

On accident I got mine to work. Here is what I did . First off I hooked up my External drive to another mac opened up enable sharing in System Preferences. Did a Time Machine backup on that machine to the the external drive then gained access to my share drive through my MBP made sure I can connect and made sure to save password in keychain. Opened up Time Machine and set it up on the shared drive and it worked . I have been doing this since 10.5.1

I replaced my D link router with a airport extreme (one week before I found out about Time Capsule I was kicking my self ) So I plugged the drive into Airport and set up the Ext Disk with password etc. Went back to MBP and repeated what I did with the networked drive and worked just as before. Now with my other mac well i had to do a fresh time machine back up but now both are working off the AIRPORT disk.

My guess is once time machine activates and identifies a disk it puts a hidden file on the disk that allows it to be used .

When last thing I forgot need to do one terminal command on each machine you want :
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

I hope all this helps