I have 3 Mac's which are making their respective backup on unRAID Time Machine. I dedicated one user share exclusively to one disk and all user are backing up into that share. So far so good; however from time to time the backup process fails.

 

Is the setup ideal having all user with their TM backup in one TM share or should I have a dedicated TM share for each user?

I've found TimeMachine doesn't behave as well as it should over network shares. You might be better off setting up three shares, splitting the space between the 1 drive.

You could also try a disk share.

I have 3 Mac's which are making their respective backup on unRAID Time Machine. I dedicated one user share exclusively to one disk and all user are backing up into that share. So far so good; however from time to time the backup process fails.

 

Is the setup ideal having all user with their TM backup in one TM share or should I have a dedicated TM share for each user?

How did you get one user share dedicated to one disk and available to Time Machine? I've tried this, and it will not appear in the Time Machine preferences when I go to select the disk/share I want to back up to. Disk shares work, but I can't get a user share to work.

 

When you open TM preferences you can select the drive you want to backup to. In that case you just select the disk drive instead a user share. That's all.

I tend to find that if the TM share/disk is mounted somewhere else it is abit flakey.

 

Having TM on it's own share (which it can mount as it pleases - you DONT need to mount the disk for it) works fine.

 

 

I've been backing up 3 macs to a 2 disk user share set to most-free allocation. Its been working for more than a month. I won't really trust it for at least five more months. I would trust a single disk user or disk share. I'd guess a disk share would be most reliable but have not tried it myself.

I'm going to set this up, but only have one Mac.

 

Did you guys export the share as "Yes (TimeMachine)" or just "Yes"?

 

I can't seem to mount the drive through speeding_ant's "mount.sh" script--I receive:

 

Mounting TimeMachine
mount_afp: AFPMountURL returned error 57, errno is 54
TimeMachine mount failed. Check settings/server. Removing mount point.
*************

 

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EDIT: Nevermind, I had assigned this user share to a disk that had not been included under the Share settings! Nor had I configured the Exports for the disk itself--but I believe it was more to do with explicitly setting what disks were included--I removed that so all disks should be included if I happen to add more in the future.

 

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But now it seems I can't write to that share...hmmm..back to the drawing board.

Silly question but how big are you making your TM shares?  I just went 1 GB because of the example but I'm not entirely sure that's big enough to back up my laptop.

 

TIA!

It needs to be at least the size of your hard drive in your Mac, and larger if you want a descent history. I've always suggest to people that double your internal hard drive is a good target. My GF has an IMac backing up to a USB external... 500 gig internal, 1TB external. She has had the machine 2 years and never had Time Machine try and delete anything.

 

That being said.. my user share that I back up to is 1TB for my 1TB macbook internal drive. My hard drive isn't very full because all my large files (media) is on my UnRaid server so I still have 850gigs free... which is 850 gigs of unraid protected storage that I can't use for anything else.

 

TimeMachine compresses it's backups.. so worst case: a full hard drive, with lots of changes every day with a backup disk the same size as your internal.. you're still going to get some history.

 

That enough info?

 

whiteatom

Yup...Thanks. 

So helpful, thanks.