Warning On Unsupported Time Machine Disks 2
Time Machine
Hey
I wanted to mention this tip as a warning to anyone who is using Time Machine on an supported drive. You may face problems and as a result lose your backups. This can be quite serious and as a result you need to take some caution.
The problem is down to using the Terminal hack to enable Time Machine to backup onto disks that are not normally supported. These include NAS Servers and possibly other computers. I am not 100% what unsupported means, there not what is recommended. The hack is done through Terminal using this line.
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
It works great initially but problems on my machine have arose. For example one day Time Machine randomly stopped working, due to write errors. The disk is perfectly fine. Time Machine has just thrown the towel in.
As a result I have lost a large set of Time Machine backups which are unusable. Although TM isn’t designed to be used as a serious backup tool, it was good for my needs. As a word of warning to anyone using the unsupported hack be careful how you tread, it may suddenly stop working.
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2 Responses to “Warning On Unsupported Time Machine Disks”
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1
Hi,
I’ve had Time Machine fall over on me twice, saying that my external drive was read only. The solution, in my case, was to unmount the drive, disconnect it, then reconnect. At that, it mounted correctly and was read/writable again.
I realise it’s not exactly the same problem that you’re having, but thought it might go some way to helping you solve your problem.
Comment By Chris on June 2nd, at 11:51 pm
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I have this same problem even with a *supported* drive. I’ve got a drive attached to an Airport Extreme base station (which is a supported configuration), and have run into this same error, from two different laptops. Time Machine is a huge disappointment. :-(
Comment By John Klassa on January 4th, at 8:29 pm