NASLite Network Attached Storage

After playing around for a few days, I managed to successfully set up Time Machine on several Macs running 10.5.6, in LAN with an old PC running NASLite2-M2. Since no comprehensive, step-by-step guide exists for this arrangement, I thought the following might save some folks the trouble of weeding through Google results and tinkering:

1. Connect to NASLite via AFP and find computername (in system prefs/sharing) and macaddress (via terminal):

2. Enable "unsupported network volumes" in terminal:

3. Create a large sparsebundle image on your LOCAL volume from terminal (where macaddress is in format: 00aa00aa00aa; no colons) (also 100m could be 500g, etc.):


4. Drag the sparsebundle to your NAS disk-N and choose disk-N from Time Machine prefs



Anyone else working with NASLite and Time Machine? Please post your techniques here.

Dakota

Further Reading
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http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/10/how- ... d-volumes/
http://nslog.com/2008/11/13/resizing_a_ ... ls_in_1055
http://sadilek.blogspot.com/2008/06/res ... -time.html)
http://isnot.tv/text/368/using-hditul-t ... sk-images/

Not working here. On my MBP, the backup worked for about 10 sessions then Time Machine started giving me an "unable to mount backup volume" error. I can force it to back up if I select "change disk" and select the same disk, but it errors out again on the next scheduled backup. I set the size of the bundle to 80G (5G more than my OS X partition) and it was only a little over 1/2 full (43G) after the first few backups.

Not sure. Could be several things.

Make sure you create the sparsebundle on your local drive, not your NAS shares. Second, if a volume mounts, unmount it and try again. Aside from that make sure the sparsebundle is named correctly. Was it filling up at all before it threw that error?

Could you post the terminal commands you ran?

Dakota

I copied and pasted the hdutil command you posted subbing my machine name and MAC:

I issued this command from my home dir and copied the bundle to my nas. Strangely, the volume did mount despite the contradictory error message. The only way to get TM to access the drive was to umount the drive and reselect it in TM config. It would then ask for server login (I selected guest) and perform the backup. Next hour (or selecting backup now), back to unable to mount error. I also tried a suggestion I found on Google search that, instead of manually creating a bundle, advised to copy the bundle that TM tries to create on the nas to a local drive before it fails and copy it back to the nas. All that managed to do was hang TM during the "preparing" phase, although it did prove to me that I had named the manually created bundle correctly (I knew this already, though, because the initial backup was fine).

The first backup was fine. Backed up my entire partition as well as several hourly before it started barfing. This was overnight last night, so the hourly backups were empty (no increase in bundle size), but no errors until this morning. Initial backup took all night and was finished about 6:30 this morning. By 10:30 it was complaining.

Puzzling.

I assume you also ran the defaults write command, since you could choose disk-N in TM.

Since the first backup worked fine but then started barfing maybe your sparsebundle was not large enough to hold additional backups, esp. if your local drive is near capacity. I don't know much about the inner workings of TM, but it may need more than 5 extra GB to store the old files and the new ones. I set my sparsebundle at 500gb for a 120gb local drive. On the other hand, I can't imagine that this factor alone could broken your backups. Nevertheless it is strange that it worked and then suddenly stopped working.

Check out imageinfo to see if you can determine if this is a potential culprit, and if so maybe resize your image to make it larger, hardware permitting.



My TM backups are still plugging along on two mac laptops.

Dakota