Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Time Machine + Samba + Snow Leopard: Making It Work

When I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard towards the end of last year, I restored just about everything — files, set­tings etc — from my pre­vi­ous Time Machine volume (dir­ectly con­nect­ing the disk via USB). I’d been back­ing up over Samba to a DIY fake Time Capsule built from a pair of USB disks and a Linksys NSLU2 run­ning Debian. Because I wanted to make sure the restore had worked, I didn’t set up Time Machine again on my new Snow Leopard install­a­tion because I didn’t want to wipe my pre­vi­ous backup, just in case.

Fast-forward a year or so and you’ll find me still backup-less (yeah I know, liv­ing dan­ger­ously), so I finally found the time and patience to get Time Machine set up again — this time on Snow Leopard, but still want­ing to back up over Samba to my DIY fake Time Capsule.

It turns out that Snow Leopard is a lot less for­giv­ing than its pre­de­cessor when it comes to which remote disks and shares it will recog­nise as tar­gets, and I had to try a whole bunch of dif­fer­ent non­sense before I found the right con­fig­ur­a­tion. I thought I’d plug the guide that worked for me, in the hope that someone might save their after­noon as I failed to do.

Background: I’m run­ning Snow Leopard 10.6.4 on a late-2008 MacBook Pro; my desired Time Machine tar­get is a stand­ard Samba share, with a pass­word, point­ing at a fat USB disk in such a way that the entire volume is shared. I nor­mally back up over wifi but used a com­bin­a­tion of dir­ect USB and wired Ethernet con­nec­tion to save time dur­ing the setup.

So, the guide that worked for me was this one (cached (PDF), if it’s off­line). Bizarrely, it’s writ­ten for Leopard, but the steps proved to be the only ones I needed to get going on Snow Leopard. I found vari­ous guides that required me to do all kinds of under­han­ded shit, like cre­at­ing .com.apple.timemachine.supported files on the volume, files named after my MAC address and so on, but none of that proved neces­sary. The key, it seems, is cre­at­ing the sparse­bundle using Disk Utility rather than the com­mand line hdiutils.

When you’ve got it run­ning, don’t for­get to add the moun­ted Time Machine volume as an excep­tion in Spotlight so it doesn’t get indexed. Good luck!