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Getting Time Machine to work as advertised

Obviously,  Time Machine is a very complex and ground-breaking application.  Unfortunately, it looks like Apple wasn’t able to get it completely running the way it would like in time to get out the door in time for Leopard GM.  It does really great work to a local USB or Firwire disk drive.  However, you won’t be able to back up to network drives at all whereas you (in the Leopard Betas) were able to back up to Airport Extreme USB disks as well as other SMB and AFP shares.  A@ron at Macrumors forums was able to revitalize this functionality by doing the following:

1) disconnect airport disk and plug into computer as a USB drive directly.
2) Set up time machine to use this volume.
3) In terminal cd to volume "cd /Volume/HDD"
4) In terminal "touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported" this will create an invisible file.
5) In terminal "sudo chown root:admin .com.apple.timemachine.supported"
6) In terminal "sudo chmod 1775 .com.apple.timemachine.supported"
7) In terminal "ls -l -a" the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file should be -rwxrwxr-t
8) eject disk, unplug from mac, plug into Airport.
9) mount at mac using connect to server in finder (command k) and afp://airportname.local./HDname
10) see if time machine now sees the drive and tries to use it.

We were able to do this as well.  In fact, we were able to do this and got our NAS SMB share working again as our backup space for Time Machine.

Obviously this is a hack and not something you want to be relying on for real backups.  Most likely Apple will continue to work on reliability issues and re-enable the functionality that the Beta included in a 10.5.x release.  This was one of the coolest features advertised about Time Machine, however, and Apple simply trying to brush the loss of the functionality under the rug is a bit of a letdown.  We’ll be waiting somewhat patiently for updates.

EDIT: While it thinks it works, the time machine backups to the SMB share are not actually moving any data.  More. Work. Needed.

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