unsupported network share

Update: no longer needed, see Making your AFP server more Time Machine Friendly

My Macbook pro decided that it was time for some irrepairable partition corruption tonight. as such I’ve had to restore from a backup

This post is a followup to my previous post about Time machine on unsupported network drives.

if you wish to do a full restore of a Time Machine backup from what apple considers an unsupported time machine device from the OSX install DVD you will need to open up Terminal from the Utilities menu then type

mkdir /Volumes/TM

mount_afp afp://username:password@ipaddressoffileserver/timemachineshare /Volumes/TM

then exit the terminal, go to Utilities > Restore this system from a backup and it should now appear in your list.

Well I bought a new unibody Macbook Pro recently to replace my old one, and found that I couldn’t get Time Machine to backup to my server.

Even after using

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

at a commandline I still got “The backup disk image could not be created”

After much hair pulling and googling, I found that it was due to Time Machine calling some AFP functions introduced in Leopard

Problem with this being that my Tiger server doesn’t support these functions.

Of course the easy way to fix this was to create the image on my Leopard machine with the following command

hdiutil create -size 90G -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE HOSTNAME_MACCADR.sparsebundle

Obviously replacing HOSTNAME with your machines hostname and replacing MACADDR with your machines mac address for en0 minus the semicolons

Once that was complete all I had to do was copy the resulting image across to my backup drive on the server and it all worked.