First off I have zero experience with Mac so I need some major hand holding please.

 

I am trying to setup a TM backup from my wife's MBP to my unraid server. I have a share setup with a single disk with AFP enabled and export set to yes. This share is a single 3TB disk and her MBP has a 1TB disk.

 

I followed online guides on how to setup the share to a network location. It involved the following steps:

 

1) Change system preferences to allow unsupported volumes to be displayed in TM

2) creating a sparsebundle locally (note I made the size 2950GB)

3) copying it over the the network drive

4) deleting the local copy of the sparsebundle

5) go into TM and setup the backup by selecting the network share from the list of disks

 

Problem is that the network share is not showing up in the list of available disks. All I see is the external drive she was using and an option to add a time capsule drive. I have been searching online for a few hours and tried several things but nothing I do makes the drive show up.

 

I did find one tip to force the TM destination using a sudo command via terminal however I keep getting an error 45 when I try this. 

 

Hopefully someone can help me or at least point me in the right direction. Appreciate any input.

When I set mine up all I had to do was mount the AFP share on my Mac and then select it as the destination in TM preferences. It should start to backup automatically.

When I look in finder I see an UNRAID AFP server and it includes a single share that I named TimeMachine. I can open the share and see the files that were copied to it from what I did above. I am assuming it is mounted yet I cannot see it when I try to select the drive to use for my TM backup.

FYI, here is the guide I followed in attempting to setup the TM backup

 

Did you enable the time machine setting in your unRAID share? I have multiple TM shares setup on my unRAID server and they all show as possible destinations in TM preferences in every Mac I have.

I enabled AFP in settings and then set the AFP to export that share.

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I followed what was recommended in other form posts for setting up a TM share.

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Can you post a screenshot of your AFP Security Settings for that share?

This is a shot-in-the-dark, but try changing the AFP Export setting to this-

 

 

You can set volume size limit to whatever you want (limits max size of the TM backup). Don't forget to click "apply". 

 

I'm thinking that this may change the way that unRAID broadcasts the AFP share and hopefully after applying the changes you'll be able to see it in TM preferences (maybe ).

I am officially a moron. The export setting was the trick. I don't recall seeing that option when I setup the share but I must have just overlooked it. Thanks so much for the help!

Glad you got it.

 

Just so you know, network TM backups are good for data but not bootable. For a bootable backup you have to use a direct attached drive.

Yeah I did read that somewhere, although I have been told that if your boot drive crashes you can do a fresh install first and then restore from the network TM backup.

Yes, you can use Network Recovery Mode and then import your data. It can be an hours long process though if there's a lot of data.

 

Time Machine supports multiple backups. I have an external HDD that I connect every week or two to keep a semi up to date bootable backup also. I seem to always have a few externals just laying around anyway. ?

 

Just something to think about.

Makes sense. Problem is this is my wife's laptop and I am setting up a network backup because she always forgot to connect her portable HDD. She uses this computer for photography so having it backed up is fairly important yet she never did it. This is the best I could come up without taking over the responsibility to do it myself. If her system crashes she will just have to wait for however long it takes or more likely however long I can stand the complaining.

 

It finished the first backup last night and I downloaded an application to change the TM backup schedule. Every hour was a bit too frequent for me so I have it going once per day now.

Edited September 23, 20178 yr by wsume99