Using samba for time machine

Posted on Apr 11, 2009 | Comments Off

The title says samba, but you can actually use any network attached storage device, as long as OSX can communicate with it.

First enable unsupported network devices within OSX, open up a terminal and type:

Once that has been done we need to create a sparse image file for the time machine backups, turn of time machine first. Then find out what your mac address is of the nic that will be connecting to your network attached storage device.

The reason why we need is mac address is because time machine uses the hostname and mac address to identify which sparse image to use. It’s time to create the disk image, do this on your local mac not on the storage device. Let’s say your computer name is “mac” and your mac address is 00:16:cb:af:91:d2 and the space you want to allocate for backups is 500g:

Connect to the network storage device in finder and move the sparse image you created to the share you want to use for time machine backups, go to the preferences of time machine, change the destination turn it on and you are set.