Joped.com

A recent work around has been posted on a number messages boards. I am not sure where it originated because a few people are claiming they found the hack. Either way, the following was NOT found by me

On the Mac type the following at a terminal:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

On the NAS server, create a file named .com.apple.timemachine.supported in the root of the shared partition.

This has finally allowed me to see the mount point using SMB. However, I have still not been able to make this work using AFP. I would rather use AFP because it is a huge performance boost.

As I started getting closer to a solution, I started to run into quite a few problems with my home server. To start off, its a very old copy of Debian that is in a very strange state. I was experimenting with apt pinning a while back, which failed pretty bad.

Its a raid 5 system with some of my more important data on it, so I can’t just wipe it. To make matters worse, one of the drives is in a degraded state and needs to be replaced. Of course, it just popped out of warranty a few months ago. I need to wait a few weeks before I can afford to purchase a new drive for it. In the mean time, I have powered down the system.

Now, I am using a very old and slow AMD system. This was a backup workstation I used a few years ago for some basic web browsing. After running it over night, I was shocked when I found it was only at 25% of backing up 80GB.

On the system side of things, it does have a gigabit network card. However, the iowait time was pegged at 80%. After some digging around, I found out the system only has a USB 1.1 port! Needless to say, I am working on getting a slightly newer system that I have up and running with a new version of Debian. It is the system I was previously using as a MythTV system when I lived back in NJ. The bad news is that it is going to set me back a few hours doing the entire setup again.

I have heard reports of the images that are created over NAS getting corrupt after disconnects and such. Since my data is so critical, I will be backing up to 2 separate devices until Apple releases a fix. The great thing is, that Time Machine can work using multiple different drives. You just need to change your backup location when you switch devices and no you can’t use more then 1 at once.