Thu, Jul 9, 2009
| Terry WalshMany of you will be successfully backing up your Apple Macs to a HP MediaSmart Server and Time Machine, courtesy of HP’s proprietary backup software which ships on their latest models.
But did you know that with a little work, you can back up your Mac to any Windows Home Server machine?
Brent Friedman has a walkthrough on his blog which is well worth checking out. Take a look and let us know how you get on.
More Info: Time Machine Backups to WHS
Terry Walsh - who has written 1254 posts on We Got Served – Windows Home Server & Your Digital Home.
Hi - I'm Terry and I'm the Owner of We Got Served. The site's been covering everything to do with Windows Home Server since February 2007.
I live in Silverstone, UK with my wife and work in the Consumer Electronics industry.
[...] or monitoring capability for Macs, a highly-sought-after feature, judging by interest — and unofficial Mac backup solutions — posted to online forums by Home Server [...]
9. July 2009 at 11:55 am
I'm guessing you mean https://brentf.com/blog/tutorials/time-machine-ba... as the only links in this post are internal.
9. July 2009 at 5:37 pm
Thanks for the link update!
These Tag/Category links are so annoying..
Walkthough > You expect to get direct you the mentioned walkthough page.. :S
9. July 2009 at 9:11 pm
Sorry! Link sorted.
10. July 2009 at 12:09 am
This looks great, but we tried it over here with a Imac with Mac OX 10.5.7. and it did not work. We got the announcement "The disk could not be activated" when trying to back-up with Timemachine
What are we doing wrong?
Best regards,
Marc Dieben
10. July 2009 at 6:53 am
As for me it is very hackky – I would not recommend to use anything similar, because it guaranties nothing, while you'll be blindly sure, that your data are safe. Even if it works during backup (or just now), it could fail during restore (or just tomorrow).
In the case proprietary solution is not available, I would prefer manual alternative, eg. Carbon Copy Cloner or something.
Just IMO. Your safety in your hands.
11. July 2009 at 1:31 am
@Marc Dieben,
I replied to your post on my blog.
@asperi,
Yes, it is a hack and is totally unsupported by Apple. I'm not sure if this is how HP does it, but it works.
11. July 2009 at 1:55 am
From what I've seen, it looks like this is indeed how HP is doing it.
For what it's worth, once I set it up correctly I've never had a problem. The only real downside to this method besides the tricky setup is that you can't do TS restores from non-modified systems, such as the installation disc.
11. July 2009 at 1:57 pm
I've being used the HP's solution for almost a year, and can say for sure that they don't change anything in the system environment to fool the system or something, instead they provide completely proprietary solution (just see as their disk looks in Disk Utility). And this gives them possibility to evolve (eg. in v2.5 they added possibility to shrink and growth the disk without loss of backuped data – I love this feature). And I think they don't stop on this, so I'm eager for the next update.
To the contrary the described hack is a dead way to nowhere. Are you on it? Good luck.
12. July 2009 at 3:28 pm
Disk Image icons can be changed and/or overridden…
17. July 2009 at 1:51 am
If you install macfuze on your mac you can read and write to ntfs drives. My macbook pro is part of my pc network. I do work on it and then upload thru the network to the whs shared folders. Using SuperDuper!, I backup directly to a folder in my users directory over a wifi connection. It's very easy.
17. July 2009 at 3:04 am
Awesome works great thanks for the link.
26. January 2010 at 5:32 am
Did the link to the article/blog about backing up a mac to windows home media server change?