Using Apple OS X Lion Server as a Home Server (Part 14 – Time Machine Network Backup)

Over the last few parts of our (now extensive) guide to Apple OS X Lion Server, we’ve taken a look at some of the more differentiating features of the platform – namely the Shared Address Book, Shared Calendar and iChat Server. Today we’ll take a step back and look at one of the most important features in any home server platform – client backup.

I’m sure there’s very little need to convince WGS readers of the importance of client backup – your data, your applications, your configuration settings all held hostage by the risk of a future hard drive failure, power surge or (even more likely in my house) catastrophic user blunder. So it makes a lot of sense to back up your clients to another device. Most of the mainstream NAS devices now support network back up of Macs via Time Machine, as does Windows Home Server 2011 (with a lot of help from third party developers). As you’d expect, OS X Lion Server also supports Mac client backup via Time Machine, and the good news is that it’s very easy to do.

Before we walk through the steps, one note on storage. As I mentioned way back in Part 2 of the series, Mac hardware looks beautiful but isn’t the most flexible when it comes to internal storage upgrades. If you have a lot of data to backup, then it’s well worth considering an additional storage device to handle that data – I talk through some of the options in that part of the series.

Okay, now head over to your server and open up the Server app. In the now familiar left hand column, you’ll see an option called Time Machine. Click it!

The Time Machine panel in Server app is very straightforward indeed. Hit the giant On/Off switch to start the Time Machine network service. You’ll be asked which volume (if you have more than one) you wish to use for Time Machine backups. If you wish to change your mind, lower down the panel, you’ll see a section which allows you to select one of your server’s volumes for backup storage. Click the Edit button if you wish to change the default option.

That’s all you need to do on the server. So, we now need to configure our Mac computers to backup to the Lion Server, rather than a local hard drive. On one of those Macs, open Time Machine (it’s in the Applications menu in Finder). If you haven’t yet set up a Time Machine backup location, you’ll be encouraged to do so, otherwise you’ll be presented with the standard Time Machine application panel.

At this point you should be able to select a Backups folder on your server. Note that we have two entries for the Mac Server in our screenshot below – one pointing directly to the server, the other, though stating “Mac Server” to an iCloud address (more of which in a future guide). Select Backups on your server hardware and click Use Backup Disk.

You’ll be asked for your server username and password, following which you should be ready to backup. A countdown will begin and your backup should soon start.

To check on progress, click the Time Machine icon in the system bar at the top of the screen.

Complete the same steps for all of your Macs, and that’s Time Machine backup over the network taken care of.