Aug 10, 2008
Network Drive backup with Time Machine (Backup to NTFS / Windows XP and Vista)
I wrestled with this all day long. Hopefully this post will help people in my position.
Setup: I have a Windows Desktop and a Mac Laptop. There is plenty of space on the desktop so I do not own an external hard drive. I want to backup my laptop wirelessly using Time machine to a remote drive on my XP machine.
What I thought: I would need to have a separate partition formated HFS+ to use Time Machine. Most of the day was spent finding out that HFS+ and NTFS (Window’s File System) can not exist on the same drive. Don’t ask me why.
Why I thought this: Previously, when attempting to backup to a network drive, Time Machine gave me “The Backup Disk Image could not be mounted.” I automatically assumed Time Machine could not write to Windows.
Why I was wrong: Time Machine creates a “.Sparcebundle” and saves files there. Apparently this can be saved on NTFS. The problem I had was creating this Sparce bundle in the first place.
My Solution: Thanks to this site I was able to solve the issue. Here’s what I did.
- Select the location for the remote backup. I chose the partition I created TimeMachine (T:).
- If you have not enabled “Unsupported Network Volumes,” follow this tutorial.
- Mount your network drive and select it in Time Machine.
- Start Time Machine (Menu button > Backup Now) and watch your remote location.
- A file is created with the structure ComputerName_MACAddress.tmp.sparcebundle. Copy this file name.
- On your Mac, open Disk Utility. Click “New Image.” Use the following settings:
- Save As ComputerName_MACAddress
- Volume name can be whatever you want.
***EDIT: Custom volume size must be the last value set*** - Change partition to “No Partition Map”
- Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”
- Custom Volume size. Set the maximum you want to use on your remote location. Don’t worry if you don’t have the room on your Mac.
- Save. Move this file to your remote location.
- Tell Time Machine to backup again and it should be working.
Good luck! If you found this article helpful, visit my sponsors.
Hopefully the rest of my computer upgrade won’t warrant a blog post!
Long overdue edit: Thanks to everyone who has commented! It’s so great this article is being found and is helpful. If you’re trying to get this to work, there are some very helpful comments. In particular, Chris points out these three points:
- The MAC address has to be the ETHERNET adapter’s MAC Address and “not” the Airport’s MAC address.
- The final file you copy will be in this format: ComputerName_MACAddress.sparcebundle
- .sparcebundle is added to the file name by the Disk Utility, not you and does not need to be removed.”
Also, my desktop computer has been busted for over a year now. I’ve been running for luck not backing up my macbook and using it as my one and only computer. Sorry I didn’t do my job in keeping up with this post.
Thanks for reading and good luck!
Jason
I tried your method above and ran into a snag.
My Macbook pro has a 100GB drive in it. I created a 150GB NTFS partition on my external drive and sharing it through Windows XP.
The part I have snag with is step 9. You mention that you don’t need the space to create the 150 GB partition. I found when I was creating the disk image, that it was actually trying to create that huge file, which caused a problem because I don’t have that much space on my MBP (let alone FREE space). I thought I would help it, by creating the disk image on the shared drive, but I got an error there also.
Perhaps the one thing that is different in my setup is that I am using an external drive, shared through Windows. Perhaps I can’t write to the drive (easy enough to confirm).
Any other thoughts? All the other steps went fine (as far as I can tell).
thank you
Hi Carl,
It looks like the steps are out of order. Change the image format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image” and the “No Partition Map” setting before you change the custom volume size.
I appreciate the comment!
Jason,
This tutorial was great, thanks a bunch. Can’t tell you how close I was to giving up on this.
Thanks again
it totally worked. thanks for everything
It worked for me….tricky part is to follow the instructions to the letter and to catch the file name (you must create it locally first, 200GB is fine, and it does not need the ._ prefix as that will be added by OSX for you). I am still trying to understand what the temporary drive icons are on the desktop of my mac that get created during the backup – I think only one of these is actually needed). But it seems to be working….
It worked for me!
This has been plaguing me for ages, I nealrly bought attached storage to sort it out rather than using my NAS.
Well impressed, thanks very very much
Hi Jason,
I’m having a problem with step 4 “Start Time Machine (Menu button > Backup Now) and watch your remote location.” Not sure where to watch the location to find the “ComputerName_MACAddress.tmp.sparcebundle.” file name.
Please could you assist?
Thank You soooo much for this. I found the sparse bundle article quite interesting. This also explain why when you delete files from a windows vm on a mac, the VM gets no smaller, DUH.
Thank Again
-Steve
Thanks for the info. I had to struggle with these steps a bit before it worked for me. I have a Mac Mini on my intranet, and I wanted its Time Machine to back up onto a WIndows NTFS drive I have on my fileserver: Z:\Backup.
* For step 5), the “ComputerName_MACAddress.sparsebundle” file only appears on the network drive for a short time while Time Machine is attempting to perform a backup (which will fail as expected), perhaps 5-10 seconds. If you are not looking, you will miss this! If you miss it, have Time Machine try again to make a backup and it will re-attempt (and re-fail 5-10 seconds later,once again deleting the file). Copy the filename quickly during this interval!
* Like Carl, I was not able to create an image file size of 100GB initially. When I attempted this custom size, Disk Utility wouldn’t let me, and downsized to 83.5GB which was how much free space I had left on my Mac Mini HD. I tried saving the file to my network drive, but there was an error doing this. I was able to work around both of these issues and successfully create a 100GB image by playing with the order in which I entered the fields in Disk Utility. It’s very important to follow the exact order of steps here, paying attention to the trick I used to fool Disk Utility in steps B) and J):
A) Click “New Image” button
B) “Where” dropdown: select the actual computer, rather than its hard drive. So in my case, I selected “Mac Mini” rather than “Macintosh HD”.
C) “Save As” field, paste in your special filename (minus the .tmp.sparsebundle part). For example, my Save As: field reads: Mac Mini_0016cbfd1258
D) “Volume Name”: Enter any arbitrary name — I used “MacBackupImage” here.
E) “Volume Size”: Do Custom. Enter your desired value here. This can be as large as you’d like — larger than your Mac’s local HD (but obviously must fit on the network drive you’re going to be using for backups!)
F) “Volume Format”, I left this to default Mac OS Extended (JOurnaled) setting
G) “Encryption”, I left this to default None
H) “Partitions”: Changed to “No Partition Map” per step 9)
I) “Image FOrmat”: Changed to “sparse bundle disk image” per step 10)
J) Change “Where” to your hard disk; here, I use “Macintosh HD”
Now hit ‘Create’, and close Disk Utility when it’s done. Go to your hard drive, and you should see two new files. You want to copy the one that DOES NOT end in “.tmp.sparsebundle” to your network share drive per Step 12).
Then, Step 13) works, and Time Machine is duped into working as well. Joy!
-Jeff
Excellent man… I confirm the thoughts of Russell…
Simply excelent!
Thanx man!
It worked. I think it worked. Oh my god it’s working! It $%& worked! Thank you!!!
oh no I spoke too soon! it stopped after several hundred megabytes and now it can’t mount the image again! any ideas?
Great info! Time Machine is backing up to my Windows Media Center PC right now via wireless N connection! =)
Follow these instructions but don’t bother with trying to grab the file name. Just get your computer name from the Sharing Preferences Pane and your MAC address from Network and put these together.
Jeff:
I am still having trouble finding where on my network drive I look to see that file name? I have the dlink DNS-323 NAS. Its already mounted as a shared drive on my Mac and has been for some time. I transfer files back and forth all the time. However time machine still won’t work. I followed your instructions except for the “watch for and copy the file name”. Can’t find it. I tried to back door this by manually retrieving my computers name and MAC address and forcing them into the file name you have in the instructions. I then follow the disk utility and input everything including this file name I had to manually create. It appears to work, even creating a larger size image than my HD truly has, I then copied the new file to my NAS and I select the NAS (which does show up) in time machine, but I still get an error message “Time Machine Error — The backup disk image could not be created”, I appreciate any help you can provide. I know I must be missing something.
Thanks,
Nate
Thank you so much, I’ve been fighting with this for a few hours now, and your steps really made it simple…. that said it hasn’t finished backing up yet, so fingers crossed XX
After I create Disk Image I only have 4 options under Image Format read only, compressed, read/write, and DVD/CD Master? There s no Sparse Bundle Disk Image?
IT WORKED!!!!! THANKS SO MUCH!
Yes, it worked after I removed the .tmp.sparsebundle part, that’s all it take!
It works!!!!
It worked great! Thank you!
Champ – good work big fella!
Works a treat.
Awesome instructions. I’m not scouring over every detail of the comments, but for those who might not be clear, when I created my 300 GB sparsebundle in Disk Utility, it took up 145 MB (megabytes) on my desktop. If you are having an available disk space issue, then you might have chosen the wrong format and/or settings for your disk image.
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Hi guys,
Just had it working for snow leopard.
Apple stripped out the macaddress off the time machine container when they try to create the mac.tmp.sparsebundle file.
You have to manually find the mac address of your ETHERNET adapter.
so mine became:
ahem’s macbook pro_002332de60e0
Strip the .tmp.sparsebundle extension out from the image and it will work ok.
cheers
Any other successful OS X 10.6 users out there?
Going to try this tonight. Anybody actually try restoring from a time machine backup created on a network drive using this method? It’s great to be able to backup but want to make sure you can use time machine to restore from that backup.
Make sure you dicsonnect the image from Disk Image before you copy it to the remote location.
Work perfectly on snow leopard!!! thanks guyz!!!
Excellent! I am on Snow Leopard and it took me a little while longer to figure it out because of a few items that require better explanation:
1. The MAC address has to be the ETHERNET adapter’s MAC Address and “not” the Airport’s MAC address.
2. The final file you copy will be in this format: ComputerName_MACAddress.sparcebundle NOTE: .sparcebundle is added to the file name by the Disk Utility, not you and does not need to be removed.
I am backing up with my Airport 802.11n connection and not my ETHERNET adapters connection. But it still requires the ETHERNET’s MAC Address.
P.S. Thanks Jason, you are the MAN!
Hi,
I have followed the tutorial to the letter and everything seemed to be working fine – but when I try to do the backup I still get the ‘unable to mount’ problem. I have a 500GB HDD with 2 partitions, 1 of which is the one I want to use for a timemachine backup. Might the fact that I have multiple partitions on the same HDD be my problem? I am using XP 64bit on the computer.
Any help with this problem would be very appreciated.
Thanks v much!
How are you guys going with speed backing up over wireless links. G or N whatever? Just a general question.
Thanks
got it going on N network cards and it works great.
You bloody ripper!
Works a treat… backing up now to my Windows PC!
As Chris above says:
“1. The MAC address has to be the ETHERNET adapter’s MAC Address and “not” the Airport’s MAC address.
2. The final file you copy will be in this format: ComputerName_MACAddress.sparcebundle
NOTE: .sparcebundle is added to the file name by the Disk Utility, not you and does not need to be removed.”
These two steps are very important to note, although I removed the “.sparsebundle” and it seemed to work fine.
This was working perfectly for me, but now I have a problem. Every time that Time Machine starts a backup, it completely locks up the Windows machine, and I have to hold the power button to shut it off. Anyone else experiencing this?
What OS are you using? I only tried it on XP.
Thanks a million!! Without this information i would have given up today… you are my hero!
I can not get the sparsbundle file to show up on my network share when I kick off the back up in TM. Any advice?
Ok … I have the sparsebundle file thanks to reading ALL the posts here. I think that I am at an wall though as my network drive is on Server 2008 using NTFS. Does anyone out there have this setup working?