In this post and its accompanying screencast I’ll share with you how to configure Mountain Lion (10.8.2) Time Machine to work with a CIFS (SMB) share.
Why supporting CIFS important?
CIFS is the most common file sharing protocol. Most NAS devices for backup and archiving provide reliable CIFS support. However, support for AFP, which has been Apple’s preferred way for communicating between Time Machine and Time Capsule has been marginal at best.
Therefore I’m hoping that this information will be useful to some of you. Also, if you think this post and screencast can be improved, please let me know.
Creating Sparsebundle
The first step would be to create a sparsebundle disk image. We’ll do this using the hdiutil
command.
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Once the sparsebundle is created, you’ll need to re-partition the image and move it onto a CIFS share. This is explained in the following screencast (I recommend watching it at 480p resolution).
Configuring Time Machine
By this point, you should have created and moved your sparsebundle onto a CIFS share and mounted it from the network.
In this section, I’ll explain the steps involved in configuring Time Machine followed by a screencast demonstrating how everything works.
Start with diskutil list
command, which will list all the mounted disks. Find the device identifier for CIFS Timemachine Backup volume. You should then enableOwnership
for that device.
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In the above case, disk1s2
is the device identifier for CIFS Timemachine Backup volume. To enableOwnership
for this disk we use sudo diskutil enableOwnership /dev/disk1s2
command.
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Verify that this worked, by using the command diskutil info disk1s2
and make sure that you see the line Owners: Enabled
.
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The volume is now configured for use with Time Machine. Next step would be to tell Time Machine to use this volume for backup. We use sudo tmutil setdestination
to do this.
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To verify that Time Machine has accepted the backup destination, run the command tmutil destinationinfo
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Following screencast walks you through the remaining steps.