How to: Backup Your Apple Mac to Windows Home Server With Time Machine

By on May 18, 2010 in How to Guides, Mac OS X, News, Windows Home Server, Windows Home Server v1

Whilst HP MediaSmart Server owners have been able to back up both PCs and Macs to their home servers for some time now, those of us Mac owners with other flavours of Windows Home Server hardware have been out of luck when it comes to backing up the Mac with Time Machine.

Until now…

Over at Multimedia-PCs.com, Jeremy Jones has a 10 step walkthrough on configuring Time Machine to work with any Windows Home Server hardware, courtesy of a supporting application called iTimeMachine.

Bear in mind that whilst this solution will backup all of your Mac data to the home server, (which in itself is a breakthrough) bare metal restore is not not an option for non-MediaSmart Server owners at this time. But if you’re a Mac guy, this is pretty essential reading.

More Info: Multimedia-PCs.com | Source: MSWHS


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About Terry Walsh

Terry Walsh is the founding editor and owner of We Got Served. Since February 2007, the site has provided detailed coverage and analysis of the emerging home server category, and has subsequently grown into a trusted outlet for digital home news and reviews.
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  • Justin

    You know, my Mac backups to my HP WHS (w/ TimeMachine) work for a month or two and just randomly start failing… I don't know what to do about it. I just have to delete the backup and start over every time and it's very annoying…

  • DJP

    I've tried this method described by Jeremy, I found its very buggy. I suspect the HP setup which differs from this implementation is more reliable.

    • Victor

      It actually doesn't work at all (the HP software)

  • EFT

    can't seem to resize the sparse bundle file on my backup folder in the WHS. the option is grayed out when i mount the file. any thoughts?

    • Jeff

      I'm not sure where you're getting hung up, but I don't think you can resize the sparse image while it is mounted. You want to do it via Disk Utility, but don't mount the image first.

  • http://twitter.com/alastairweller @alastairweller

    I haven't had any luck with my mediasmart server and timemachine. The backup disk status just remains as Not Available.

  • http://intensedebate.com/profiles/pricklynet Mike

    I know that this is a little of topic – does anyone know a way to back up Ubuntu to WHS?

  • Justin

    to get my timemachines to even work at all, I had to upgrade my HP MediaSmart EX485 to that new version 3. In version 2, I was able to follow a guide and get my sparse bundle created by hand and point time machine to it manually, but version 3 worked out of the box.

    However, they both stop syncing randomly with time machine complaining about errors in the backup image. Disk Util doesn't fix it either…

    As I said, it's VERY annoying.

    As for Ubuntu, I don't know specifically, but I'd look into 'rsync'. We use that to archive certain folders. I don't know it if could give you a fully running state system backup though.

  • Jeff

    Does anyone know why iTimeMachine is needed? A lot of us have been backing up to WHS for a while now without using it. I merely used the instructions provided on this very site. (http://wiki.wegotserved.com/index.php?title=Time_Machine_Backup_to_WHS)

  • http://intensedebate.com/profiles/pricklynet Mike

    Thanks for the tip about rsync Justin – took me a while to check back here … I just hoped that if there was an Apple solution there might be options for other OS too …