Hacking Time Machine


This past week I was the unfortunate victim of hard drive failure on my 1stgen Macbook Pro. After looking through my local NAS and finding that my most recent backup was done in April, I kicked myself a little bit. I have everything available to me to do regular backups, but like most people I am just too lazy. I decided that I wanted to try and get Time Machine to perform backups to a network share instead of a local drive. A simple terminal command was all that was needed to make my network volumes show up in Time Machine.
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Just changing this preference has worked for many other people, but I get the a message from Time Machine stating “The backup disk image could not be created.” Nothing on google or the apple support forums seems to give any good info on the situation.
Any ideas?

3 thoughts on “Hacking Time Machine

  1. That, among many other reasons, is why I’m not a time machine fan. I use Mozy for documents, a strict duplicate-on-import regimen for photos, and a loose back-up plan for photos.
    As you know, my movies are not backed up anywhere — mostly cause I’m constantly filling the biggest drives I can afford with them!

  2. Fortunately it was not hard drive failure! I just got my machine back from the apple store and was told that they replaced my hard drive, hard drive cable, and then the entire logic board before they got it working. I did get a 20 GB larger hard drive than I had before, but I with I would have gotten a nice shiny Core 2 duo CPU instead of my Core Duo. Oh well. The good news is that I was able to talk them into giving me my old drive as well for “data recovery”. But if it never failed, data recovery is as easy as putting it in a USB enclosure and running migration wizard!
    When they did reassemble my machine, they didn’t press the parts of the case together very well. I might have to press that issue a few times in the coming months. I think I have 5 months of free applecare service left. I wonder if it’s like Best Buy’s plans where if you get three repairs then they just give you a replacement? Unibody, here I come. 🙂

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