How to set unRAID up with Time Machine?

could anyone give a brief step-by-step as to how to create a proper share that can be used with Time Machine? the little info i found here seems to indicate that the best bet is to create the shared backup area on a single disk, but i am not getting how this share is created, and how Time Machine can be linked to it.

i also saw one mention of CrashPlan being used by at least one forum member...is that a more recommendable solution, as i saw there being a few problems with Time Machine getting "un-linked" and backups even corrupted if not used with the cache-folders plugin? maybe setting up cache-folders isn't as difficult as i imagine it to be, but i am somewhat confused right now as to what the best way to go is...CrashPlan appears to be available as a Linux install, but i wouldn't know where to start with that either...maybe i should break that up into a separate thread? if so, just let me know, and i'll edit this post and paste the CrashPlan part into a new post.

hope to get some help, as a Saturday night and Sunday would be the perfect time to get this working (sadly enough;)

I've created a share callled 'Time Machine', put it on a single disk, gave it a max of 500GB size, used AFP for network protocol, used export type "TimeMachine" with public security and that was it.

I hope you don't mind me butting in here tillkrueger but I'm in the same situation.

Jowi, does the TM share just appear when you "select backup disk" on OSX?  I'm running Lion.  I've done as you suggested... can't see it from my MBP.

I remember that it did not show up immediatly, make sure it is spun up, and try finding & selecting it in Finder first.

But it should show up eventually as 'Time Machine on UNRAID'.

Thanks jowi, that worked.

I looked in finder, and there was Tower and Tower SMB.  Under tower only Time Machine was listed. I clicked on that, and tried setting up a Time Machine backup again and it appeared in seconds!

FYI for anyone else setting up a TM Share, note that TimeMachine volume size limit is in MB!

tillkrueger, Also when you create the new share you can't set the size or set as TM until you've filled out he basic info and pressed add share.  Then all the other settings appear.  I thought that might help you out.

Also beware that standard osx makes a backup using timemachine every hour, this will make the disk NEVER spin down... i've changed the TM behaviour using a 3rd party tool so it only backups once a week. Enough for me. But that causes another problem, if the timemachine disk is not spun up when it wants to make a backup, timemachine cant find it and will not backup, or get in some delayed state.

What i did is make a change so that timemachine backups every saturday at 7:01, and i have a added a cron task that will spin up the time machine disk and parity disk every saturday at 7:00

thanks guys, i was just about to post about it not working for me, but just figured out what the problem was...for the benefit of others, let me iterate what i did (btw, i'm using the SimpleFeatures UI):

> go into "Shares" and "Add Share"

  (i did it on my disk 12, by including "disk 12" and excluding every other disk...btw, do i need to exclude them all individually?)

> once the share was added, i exported it as an AFP "TimeMachine" share and gave it 1200000MB

  (a choice to use GB/TB would be great...i left SMB at its default "YES", or is there a benefit in setting that to "NO"?)

> i selected the share in my finder, and this is where i initially went wrong...i selected it the "Time Machine" share on my SMB Share, not realizing that when i exported TimeMachine as AFP, a new "unRAID" disk appeared (my other disk is called "unRAID-SMB")

> after i selected the "Time Machine" share on my "unRAID" disk, it popped up in my available disks within my Time Machine Preference pane, and it is now backing up to it (7hrs to go for 422GB)

so, if i understood you correctly, in its current setup, the disk will stay spun up and will be ready for backup as long as the unRAID server stays online, right? i don't really mind, as it remains on 24/7 anyway, usually, although when i travel, i do sometimes turn it off, but since i'd be taking my MacBook Pro with me, it couldn't be backed up to the server anyway then.

i guess at this point i should probably figure out how to increase backup speed, maybe by finally figuring out the cache-drive feature, which i have yet to tackle? of course, after this initial backup, the next backups should be much, much quicker, as i rarely add more than a few GB's per day.

to get back to my original post, would it be better to use something like "CrashPlan", if i were willing to give up the flashy Time Machine features and only look for the quickest, most reliable full-backup method?

thanks again for giving me the necessary pointers to get this to work!

For some reason looking at the mac time machine settings, somehow it decided to start accessing files on the unraid time machine disk, even though backup was turned off... it even spun up the disks. Weird. Rebooted the mac and now it looks ok again... i dont want the mac to keep the unraid server up and runnning all the time when it is not doing anything... so it must be some weird stuff in the mac that kept TM accessing the unraid disk. Sometimes osx is just like windows. A lot of garbage with a will of its own.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=19743

great thread on UNRAID/MAC basics

got my TimeMachine backing up nicely now...thanks for all your help!

and thanks for that link, mr-hexen...great resource...wish i had seen that before i started this thread, but maybe this thread will help somebody else find it, in the future.

Hi,

I've set up my UnRAID Tim Machine - was working great for about a week until today when I got the dreaded "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you" message.

Is there any way to troubleshoot this, or to prevent it from happening in the future?  Wondering if it's something with my configuration that isn't correct in setting up the share?

Thanks

Hi,

 

I've set up my UnRAID Tim Machine - was working great for about a week until today when I got the dreaded "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you" message.

 

Is there any way to troubleshoot this, or to prevent it from happening in the future?  Wondering if it's something with my configuration that isn't correct in setting up the share?

 

Thanks

I'm don't own a mac, nor have I ever used time machine, but do the backups depend on each other? Easy way of telling if they do is that the first one will be huge (10GB+, depending on what you backed up) then all the others will be a hell of a lot less (Maybe a GB).

If the above is true, it's probably because it just backups what's different, so, the first one would say something like:-

"User has picture A in /pictures/a.jpg and it contains the following data:-

VGhlcmUlMjB3b3VsZCUyMGJlJTIwcGljdHVyZSUyMGRhdGElMjBoZXJlJTJDJTIwbm9yJTIwd291bGQlMjBpdCUyMHByb2JhYmx5JTIwYmUlMjBiYXNlZDY0JTI3ZCUyQyUyMGNvbnNpZGVyaW5nJTIwYmFzZTY0JTIwaXMlMjByZWFsbHklMjBvbmx5JTIwdG8lMjBoZWxwJTIwZGF0YSUyMHRyYXZlbCUyMG92ZXIlMjBwcm90b2NvbHMlMjB0aGF0JTIwYXJlbiUyN3QlMjB0b28lMjBhY2NlcHRpbmclMjBvZiUyMHRoZSUyMGZ1bGwlMjBieXRlJTIwcmFuZ2UlMjAlMjhIVFRQL2V0YyUyOS4="

Then the next one would say nothing about picture A unless picture A has changed/been moved/renamed, so, if any single backup was removed then everything after that date would be nullified because it wouldn't have the full story.

Once again, I have no idea, I don't use a mac, it's just the way that lots of virtual machine backup software works (Which is the only backup software I use, I don't keep important data anywhere but my mind really, no "important" photos/etc).

The reason why I ask is, if this is true, then it probably detected that you deleted a backup (Assuming you did) and wants to make a new backup now, just my guess, I don't use a mac.

Yes I believe thats how it works - the first backup is large and take a long time and after that it just does the delta.

Yes I believe thats how it works - the first backup is large and take a long time and after that it just does the delta.

Then did you delete any of the backup files? If so, that's probably why. If not, then no idea, I recommend looking at the "Console log" (I presume output from terminal? Or the system log? Not too sure, once again, never used a mac), apparently it'll log debug information, may tell you why it wants to make a back-up.

Dec 21 18:37:35 iMac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[189]: Backup requested by user
Dec 21 18:37:35 iMac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[189]: Starting standard backup
Dec 21 18:37:35 iMac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[189]: Backing up to: /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb

Items like that should show up, based on:_

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1301862?start=0&tstart=0

Hi,

 

I've set up my UnRAID Tim Machine - was working great for about a week until today when I got the dreaded "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you" message.

 

Is there any way to troubleshoot this, or to prevent it from happening in the future?  Wondering if it's something with my configuration that isn't correct in setting up the share?

 

Thanks

NoMax, this tutorial solves that issue for me every time (about 2 or 3 times/year): 

http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,08,27,169,fix-time-machine-sparsebundle-nas-based-backup-errors.html

How many people using unRAID have set this up successfully?

It is working great in my setup.

Using it for backing up my 2013 rMBP, working a treat.

I tried it many months ago and abandoned it.  Took me awhile to realize that you can't back up multiple Mac's to the same TM share.  Once you do, the others are locked out with strange errors.  I broke it up and tried again with each Mac getting a dedicated share, but after a few weeks they started having problems again.  Considering AFP will be decommissioned later on, I decided to just stick with CrashPlan and just use TM for locally attached disks.