So you have a Mac and instead of backing up to an external hard-drive ($$$) you’d like to backup to an NTFS drive that is on the network (maybe to your Windows 7 desktop machine)? Sweet cuz that’s what this tutorial addresses!
What you’ll need:
- A Mac running OS 1.5 or higher with Time Machine Installed (I’m running 10.5.8)
- A separate computer with an NTFS-formatted hard-drive that has enough free space to fit all of the data you plan to backup (I created a a 500 GB NTFS partition on my Win 7 PC to backup my 200 GB Macbook Pro) Note: I don’t suggest using Paragon Partition Manager (aka ParaGONE Partition DAMAGER) to partition your PC as it wrote over my system partition and I couldn’t boot into Windows afterwards – “Missing Operating System”. If you run into this issue as well, comment and I’ll tell you how I fixed this issue.
Follow these steps:
On your Windows 7 Machine
- Make sure you have a Windows password set up by going to Control Panel, click on ‘User Accounts and Family Safety’ and then ‘Change your Windows password’
- Turn on sharing by going to Control Panel and clicking on ‘Choose homegroup and sharing options’ under ‘Network and Internet’, select ‘Change advanced sharing settings…’ and under ‘Public’ click on ‘Turn on network discovery’, ‘Turn on file and printer sharing’, ‘Turn on sharing so anyone with network access can read and write files in the Public folders’, ‘Use 128-bit encryption…’ and ‘Turn on password protected sharing’. Save your settings.
- Next, go to ‘Computer’ and right click on the drive you would like to backup to and click on ‘Share with -> Advanced sharing…’
- Click ‘Share this folder’ and give it a Share name (Mine is called TimeMachine)
- Click on ‘Permissions’ and with ‘Everyone’ selected, remove uncheck all the check boxes
- Click on ‘Add…’ and start typing your Windows Login name (mine is Chris-PC) and click on ‘Check Names’ and then select your Windows Login
- Click on ‘OK’ on all of the windows until they’re closed down
- Get your computer’s ip address by typing in cmd into the search box in your start menu and pressing ‘enter’, then when the black dos window comes up, type in ipconfig /all and scroll up to wherever it says IP Address (mine says IPv4 Address . . . . . . : 192.168.0.109). Write this down.
On your Mac
- Go into Applications / Utilities and open up ‘Terminal’
- Copy and paste this command into terminal (all on one line)
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Apple does not display NTFS drives on the network, so this command allows you to see said drives - Hit enter / return
- Mount your network drive by clicking on ‘Go -> Connect to Server…’, entering in smb://followed by your Windows machine’s IP address you wrote down earlier. OR you can use your Windows machine’s name (this is probably better). (Mine is Chris-PC). It will then prompt you for your windows login and password, then the volume you want to mount (mine is T: – TimeMachine).
Courtesy of Lifehacker.com
- Start up Time Machine. Click on ‘Change Disk…’ and select the Windows drive you want to back up to (mine is TimeMachine). Time Machine will fail this first time. Before it does:
- in Finder, go to ‘Go -> Network’ and navigate into your backup drive. You will see a file there with your MacName_MACAddress.tmp.sparsebundle. Copy this name.
- Open up Disk Utility, Click ‘New Image’. In the next steps the order is very important.
- Under the dropdown, select your computer name (Chris Macbook Pro) rather than Macintosh HD.
- Use the following settings:
Save As MacName_MACAddress
Volume name can be whatever
Set volume size to the max amount of space you have allocated on your Windows machine.
Volume Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Encryption: none
Partitions: ‘No Partition Map’
Image Format: ‘Sparce Bundle Disk Image’ - Now change the dropdown from your computer name back to ‘Macintosh HD’. Save onto your Mac.
- Copy this file onto your Windows machine in the backup location
- Run Time machine again and it should be working!
Alternatively, if you find this frustrating or cumbersome, you can pick up Apple’s Time Capsule. It’s expensive, but an elegant solution.
—
Resources:
http://lifehacker.com/software/mac-os-x/how-to-mount-a-windows-shared-folder-on-your-mac-247148.php
http://imulus.com/blog/george/software/using-leopard-time-machine-to-backup-of-a-network/
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31 Comments
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I can’t seem to get it to work. It still gets stuck on the “making backup disk avalaible”
And when I have the file copied into the folder it adds a “1″ on the end of the file it creates.
On which step do you get that message? And if you are getting the 1 on the end of the filename, it is likely that that the sparsebundle file already exists in the folder you are saving it to. Try saving it somewhere else.
I get the same message. It’s after step 12, when you actually run timemachine. It creates a second sparsebundle with an attached ’1′ and eventually gives up and says ‘the sparsebundle could not be created’ error 45. Any ideas? I’d love to get this to work. I use SNOW Leopard and Win XP.
On your Win XP machine, I would check the settings in file and print sharing to make sure that files can be altered. Then I would right click->properties on the sparse bundle file that you created on your PC and ensure that you have given read and write access to the file. Hope that helps!
I haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet so I haven’t tested it.
The only thing I should mention to anyone who wants to try this is that it is a lot slower to backup over the network than over a physical drive.
Okay, I did that and you were right, the sparse bundle didn’t have permissions set. But it still won’t work. It always creates a new temporary sparse bundle, called [mac name blabla..]-1.tmp…. It’s not supposed to do that, right? It’s supposed to recognize the one I put there as it’s “original”, right?
That is strange, it shouldn’t create a new sparse bundle. I am currently running Leopard 10.5.8 and Win7 but I will be upgrading to Snow Leopard in a few days… I’ll hit you back up once I try it using Snow Leopard.
I ran into a similar “-1″ problem on Snow Leopard. Turns out my backup was showing up on the network drive using only the host name of my machine. .tmp.sparsebundle so that is what I used as my bundle name. I found that you need the Ethernet MAC address appended even though Snow Leopard does not appear to be creating the sparsebundle with this name. Once I created my sparse bundle with _.sparsebundle everything worked as expected.
ifconfig en0 | grep ether | awk ‘{print $2}’ | sed ‘s/://g’
Thanks!
I have the same problem, sharing is on for the sparse bundle but it still keeps trying to create another .tmp bundle? Any ideas?
Hi. Has this issue been resolved or is it true that MAC OS X 10.6.4 and following releases don’t support this type of backup? I’m thinking to buy a new windows PC, and/or if I need a NAS with time machine capabilities…. If it works on Win7 as well, I don’t need time Machina capable NAS. If it doesn’t then I should buy it as well.
Since I can buy this stuff only at the nearest store, which is 2500km from me, I want to know in advance of course which stuff I need to buy.
Thanks in advance
Hi Vin, really sorry about the delayed response.. I just moved into a new place. I haven’t had a chance to upgrade to 10.6 so I can’t say whether it works or not, but what I can tell you is that backing up is REALLY slow over the network and seeing as HDD space is cheap these days, I would highly suggest you pick up an external HDD at that store.
I haven’t updated to 10.6 yet because all of my thesis research is on here and i’m weary of doing something so drastic to my OS. I’ll keep you guys posted though when I do and once I try it. But once again, I only set up an over-the-network backup because I was curious on how to do it, I still think that an external HDD is a more viable option.
Hi this is very well written document. However, I get stuck at when I run the actual back up in TM, it gives me an error “Time machine could not complete the back up. The backup disk is not available.”
I am using Windows Server 2003 and I have a 1tb external HD attached to it for the mac computers we use, I have given the shared folders full permissions and it still gets stuck. Any ideas?
I’d love to have this working
Hi, I’m having touble with the checkboxes, at the step 5 on my Windows. Do I have to check or uncheck the boxes? And, maybe because of that I can’t find that file, MacName_MACAddress.tmp.sparsebundle anywhere.
And by the way, this is a very good tutorial, thanks a lot!
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Hi
Im trying to follow your guide on mac os x 10.6.7 but can’t get it to work. I suspect its the name of the sparseimage. I’ve tried “MacName_MacAddress” (Also with removing the : in the mac address), “MacName”, “MacName_”, “MacName” with – instead of spaces.
And maybe a couple more…
Tips?
Hmm not sure Njall. I’m not running that version of OS X. I’ve been putting off the upgrade since all my thesis work is on there and I don’t want to risk it until after my defense.
Have you considered an external drive? It is a million times faster to back up on than over the network.
Naming file “myName_012334f9dA04.sparsebundle” helped!
Thanks!
Yeah!! thanks a million! works like a charm! even have a data rate of nearly 17MBytes per seconds..whoohoo!
This is not working anymore with Mac OsX Lion since they decided to drop the smb support.
They say to upgrade NAS firmware, but I don’t know how to fake this on a network shared hard drive.If you have any workaround or idea to bring, feel free to send me an email.
best regards
Good info. I successfully tied 10.6.8 MBP into my new WIN7 machine with 2TB drive. Using this set of instructions and working on the SECURITY and PERMISSIONS of WIN7 I now have both MBPs backing up using Time Machine over the cable and wireless without using a Win password. I’ve got three smaller portable backup drives now I can use as boat anchors. Thanks muchly.
Awesome, congrats man
Tried this and does not work. Once complete Timemachine just states unable to find network path or disk does not support AFP format
Hi, this procedure didn’t work for me either from OSX Lion (10.7.1). Error message “the network backup disk does not support the required AFP features”.
I’m trying to go to a WD Caviar Black 1TB on a Windows 7 machine.
You can do an AFS fake to get around this.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4700
If I partition my harddrive and use windows can I use time machine to back up the data on the two operating systems?
Im new to this…
Currently, time machine only works for Mac OS. You may have to look into a different piece of backup software if you want to backup both machines.
I’m getting a Error Message “Unable to Create “macname.tmp.sparsebundle.” (Operation not Supported)
Any Ideas??
Hey everyone, I have some updates for you guys who are having trouble you may want to try out. I recently downgraded to Snow Leopard from Lion because I’m sick of the new Expose and not being able to use Time Machine over network. Had this working before but finally just got it to work again after watching a youtube video located here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBfovmsdYVk
When Time machine initially fails, for me it was creating a file “Wesley’s Macbook Pro.tmp.sparsebundle” with no MAC address as I watched my network drive during the failure.
Follow this guide, but when you’re looking for your mac address, DO NOT USE Ethernet ID or Airport ID which you find under the advanced menu in network preferences. Rather, OPEN TERMINAL and type this:
“ifconfig en0 | grep ether”
This command will output something similar to “ether 00:1f:d2:10:e0:5c” this is the correct address to use. Now when creating your sparse bundle with DiskUtility, title the disk image with spaces and the apostrophe like this “Wesley’s Macbook Pro_001fd210e05c”, only using your computer name and output from terminal command shown.
Hope this helps as this is one of the first google results when looking for a guide on this topic.
Wes
Also if you didn’t notice remove the “:” colons from the address when creating sparse bundle name.
Still using more than a year now on two MBPs networked to our Win7/64 machine with 2 TB drive. Both using 10.6.8 OS on the macs and each mbp connects to a virtual drive on the Win7 machine. Connects via airport and/or ethernet and we used en0: as the reference. I did have some troubles this year but traced to a bad memory stick on Win7 machine. Replaced memory and now all is good again. My 90GB backed up last week and second machine just did 340gb after being away for a while. Not super speed but once the initial backup is done I don’t notice the hourly incrementals at all. So far, so good. You should test TM regularly just to make sure it all works when needed.