How do I make Lion Server support more than one Time Machine disk?

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Level 1

22 points

How do I make Lion Server support more than one Time Machine disk?

Under Snow Leopard Server, I had two disks set up for Time Machine backups. This came about as I'm running a Mac Mini with the 500 GB internal drives which turned out to be insufficient for one of the connected Macs which uses a terabyte drive. I then added an external 6 TB drive and made it a Time Machine destination too. Worked beautifully. When I upgraded to Lion Server the external large drive was no longer available for backups and the interface for configuration within Server only allows for one drive to be in use at a time. Any suggestions (short on reverting to Snow Leopard) as to how to re-enable having both drives available for networked Time Machine access?

Thanks!

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.1), Server version

Posted on Sep 14, 2011 8:07 PM

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Answer 1

tyrotex

Level 1

14 points

Sep 15, 2011 12:02 AM in response to AdamHough

Hi Adam,

Before I even realised that the Server app had a setting for TM, I just configured TM backups on my (SL) clients as I had done in SL.

I shared the drive(s) on the server I wanted to use.

For each client, I mounted the appropriate shared drive containing its sparseimage file, then set TM on the client to use that drive.

Then I unmounted the shared drive and started TM.

It mounted the remote drive (without displaying it in Finder) and opened the sparseimage, showing the "Time Machine Backups" volume on the desktop.

So you could use any drive attached to the server to backup any client.

It worked fine for me.

In the end, I changed my clients to use the (single) shared "Backups" volume which Server.app creates because I can fit all my stuff on one drive.

HTH

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Answer 2

AdamHough Author

Level 1

22 points

Oct 2, 2011 5:14 PM in response to tyrotex

I tried this but TimeMachine on the Lion client continually complained that AFP doesn't support the required mechanism. I also tried moving to using just the one large external drive connected via Firewire but it seems external drives (at least over Firewire; not tried other interfaces) can no longer be used as repositories for network backups.

This kinda renders the Mac Mini useless as a TimeMachine server as a single 500GB drive just isn't large enough if there are any other computers that use it. I really don't understand why Apple has mucked up Lion Server so badly; this all worked quite well under Snow Leopard Server.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

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