Eadmanday

Q: Time Machine to windows DPM

Hey all,

 

I am trying to find a good inexpensive way to backup around 5 Mac books we have at work here. We primarily us Windows 7 and have a full functioning domain with Windows backups running 4 times a day.

 

I want to know if i can take OSx server, and point Time Machine to a Windows Shared drive. Thus each backup will be on the Windows server and will be backed up during the windows backup cycle.

 

Dont know if this would work. or if its the best option. but it sure is the cheapest at this point in time.

 

Thanks,

Austen

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11), OSX Server

Posted on Jun 16, 2016 3:50 PM

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Q: Time Machine to windows DPM

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  • by John Lockwood,

    John Lockwood John Lockwood Jun 17, 2016 2:20 AM in response to Eadmanday
    Level 6 (9,215 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Jun 17, 2016 2:20 AM in response to Eadmanday

    Time Machine is currently designed to work in one of two ways, either to backup to a locally attached hard disk i.e. one plugged directly in to your Mac, or to backup to a Time Machine capable AFP capable file server. This later option is supported by Apple's Server.app software and Apple's Time Capsule WiFi device.

     

    Unofficially various NAS (Network Attached Storage) servers which already include AFP file server software can also act as a Time Machine compatible destinations, however this is not officially supported by Apple and some people therefore do not recommend it, I can say that I have used a NetGear ReadyNAS as a Time Machine server and it works well enough for me.

     

    Windows Server however does not support AFP at all, and hence also does not support Time Machine backups itself at all.

     

    What you are describing would be for a Mac server to 'mount' the shared volume provided by the Windows server - which would have to be via SMB since that is all that a Windows Server supports, and then to 're-share' it via AFP with Time Machine support enabled. I will not categorically say this is impossible but I suspect in reality it is not or far too difficult, unreliable and definitely not supported officially. A similar but in this case even less possible approach is for a Mac server to 'mount' a network volume via either NFS or iSCSI from another server and then to 're-share' it via AFP. This at least in terms of re-sharing for normal AFP access is more common due to the different way both NFS and iSCSI operate compared to SMB but Windows Server does not support this.

     

    I think you will need to look for a different backup solution for your Macs, either a hard disk directly attached to the Mac server and then configure that as a Time Machine server, or use a NAS server, or use some other completely different software e.g. Archiware P5, or Crashplan or Backblaze.

  • by Leopardus,

    Leopardus Leopardus Jun 18, 2016 7:02 AM in response to Eadmanday
    Level 4 (1,087 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 18, 2016 7:02 AM in response to Eadmanday

    Austen,

     

    You can have a look at this article by TomNelson1 which I found quite by accident.

     

    http://macs.about.com/od/applications/ss/top-10-applications.htm#step6

     

    It might be worth to contact him with respect to a solution too.

     

    HTH

     

    Leo