A poor man’s apple time capsule (wireless router + home NAS)
Published October 27th, 2008 in dns-323, hacks, mac, unix
I wanted to use my dlink dns-323 NAS (along with my trusty linksys WRT54g) as a cheap version of an Apple Time Capsule - so I can back up my Macbook Pro (Leopard) wirelessly.
It’s just one of the many things my NAS does, so I wanted to impose a hard limit of 250GB on the Time Machine backup — because I don’t want it to consume the whole 1TB disk.
Note: I just happen to have love my DNS 323, but this should work for any network attached storage unit. It is not 323 specific!
Anyway, hang on to your flux capacitors, here’s what we’re gonna do…
Summary:
- Get your Mac’s computername and wired ethernet address.
- Create a 1GB sparse image file with Disk Utility. Save it as <computername>_<ethernetaddr>. — Without spaces or hyphens in the ethernet mac address!
- Resize the sparse image file to your desired size
- Copy sparse image file to DNS-323
- Symlink
- Point Time Machine at DNS-323
Note: Most of this is done on your Mac, not the 323.
Prep:
Obtain Mac computername:
Open up a terminal and type:
uname -n
(Or go to system -> sharing -> computer name)
Copy the resulting value to a text file. (Note: If the computer name ends with a “.local”, strip this “.local” value leaving only the computername.
Ethernet address:
Open up terminal and type
ifconfig en0
(Or open Network Utility from Spotlight)
Copy the value on the second line, ether. It will start with 00:1b:…
Next, we must enable TimeMachine to recognize network drives (this feature is turned off by default). Again, in terminal on your mac:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
I loosely followed TimN’s post on creating a Time Machine disk, starting at, “Create a sparse image file”. So, credit goes to him for figuring the sparse image stuff out. Thanks Tim!
1. Open up Disk Utility
2. Create a new blank disk image
3. Save As: <computername>_<ethernet address - NO COLONS or DASHES> (use your saved values from above)
E.g. hackbook_001b639c705d
4. Volume Name: whatever you want
5. Size: Apple recommends 1.5x to 2x the size of your hard drive you are backing up. Problem here is that if your HD (not the DNS) doesn’t have enough room, disk utility will get mad and not let you make a disk image that is larger than the free space available. I’ll assume everyone is needs a disk image that is larger than disk utility will allow them to make. Just enter 1GB for now.
6. Volume Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled) — this might be different for some people.
7. Encryption - up to you
8. Partitions - single partition - apple partition map
9. Image Format - sparse bundle disk image
10. Create it on your desktop:
11. The newly created sparsebundle should show up in disk utility.
12. Select the volume name (the one you just named in the previous step) and click the eject button (from the top menubar):
13. Now click on the sparsebundle file (<computername>_<ethernetadd>) and click on the “resize image” button (from the top menubar).
14. Click on the Down arrow and select “Resize Image Only”. My Mac has a 100gb disk, 50gb used, so I’m just gonna go with around 250gb for Time Machine.
15. Make the size as large as you want and click Resize:
16. Mount the disk image for the sparsebundle by double clicking on the sparsebundle file in disk utility
17. Click on the partition tab.
18. Change “current volume” to “1 partition” - re-enter the volume name again to keep it consistent:
Click Apply:
19. Move the sparse file to the DNS-323. I moved it to /Volume 2/backups/TimeMachine/. You might want to just leave it in /Volume 2/ however. More on that below.
And finally,
20. Make sure you eject any of those sparsebundle images from your desktop if any are still around.
Now… At this point, after a bit of tinkering, I realized that in order for it to work properly with the space, I had to create a symlink from the root of Volume 2 to my /backups/TimeMachine directory where I placed to sparse image.
You could avoid having to symlink if you simply copied the sparse image file to the root of Volume 2 in step 19, above, but I guess I like to make things difficult for myself.
IMPORTANT: You must have either the actual sparse image file moved into the root of the DNS-323 volume OR place a symlink pointing to it at the root of the DNS-323 volume. Otherwise Time Machine will not find it properly. (Or try to create its own… and fail).
<ssh to dns-323>
cd /mnt/HD_b2/
Note: Enter the next command all on a single line (no line breaks - replace for your computername and ethernetaddr accordingly)
ln -s /mnt/HD_b2/backups/TimeMachine/hackbook_001b639c705d.sparsebundle hackbook_001b639c705d.sparsebundle
ls -lF
You should see something similar to the following:
drwxrwxrwx 3 nobody 501 4096 Oct 27 12:57 backups/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 65 Oct 27 13:37 hackbook_001b639c705d.sparsebundle -> /mnt/HD_b2/backups/TimeMachine/hackbook_001b639c705d.sparsebundle/
21. Open time machine. Point it to the DNS-323 and login with whatever user is going to do the back ups.
Note that although Time Machine shows the full capacity of Volume 2 (915.8GB in my case), it is actually constrained to the size you created the sparse image to be. (Mine was set to ~250GB).
To verify, as Time Machine starts to back up, open “Console” and look for the backupd entries:
(Alternatively, from terminal on your mac):
tail -f /var/log/system.log | grep backupd
On the line that says “No pre-backup thinning needed… 247.36 GB available”, the # GB available should be roughly equal to the size you specified for your sparsebundle image.
If everything went well, Time Machine should now be able to back up to your 323!
Update 28/10/08 - I have come across a rather infuriating bug where sometimes, OSX doesn’t mount the volume contained in the sparse image properly, thus causing Time Machine backup to fail. My manual fix is to browse to Volume 2 in the Finder, where the sparse image is contained, then restart the Time Machine backup. It’s a manual workaround.. but there’s gotta be a better way to do it. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know in the comments.
60 Comments to “A poor man’s apple time capsule (wireless router + home NAS)”
- 1 Pingback on Jan 6th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
- 2 Pingback on Jan 26th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
- 3 Pingback on May 6th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Great Guide man!
Unfortunatly I couldn’t have it working….
Everything is ok, but when the backup starts it simply fail….
this is my log…
Nov 8 14:41:14 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Backup requested by user
Nov 8 14:41:14 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Starting standard backup
Nov 8 14:41:14 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Network mountpoint /Volumes/Volume_1 not owned by backupd… remounting
Nov 8 14:41:15 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Network volume mounted at: /Volumes/Volume_1-1
Nov 8 14:41:15 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Creating disk image /Volumes/Volume_1-1/Hal9000_00224124e28d.sparsebundle
Nov 8 14:43:48 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Error 45 creating backup disk image
Nov 8 14:43:48 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Failed to create disk image
Nov 8 14:43:48 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Network mountpoint /Volumes/Volume_1 not owned by backupd… remounting
Nov 8 14:43:49 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Network volume mounted at: /Volumes/Volume_1-2
Nov 8 14:43:49 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Network mountpoint /Volumes/Volume_1 not owned by backupd… remounting
Nov 8 14:43:49 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Network volume mounted at: /Volumes/Volume_1-3
Nov 8 14:43:53 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Backup failed with error: 20
Nov 8 14:43:53 Hal9000 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[545]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
can you understand what happens here?
TNX!
Dave
I’m really sorry…
It was my mistake!
After looking at the log I realised that it was looking for the file Hal9000_00224124e28d.sparsebundle and I created the Hal9000.local_00224124e28d.sparsebundle because when I used the command uname -n, it said that my computer name was Hal9000.local.
Thanks again, it works and it’s amazing!!!!
Bye
Dave
Perhaps just leave it mounted? could add it to startup items so it boots on login. Not sure if this is a portable setup or not.
Hey man
Worked like a charm, Thank you very much for publishing this.
To over come creating a symlink I just created a new share in my dns 323 pointing to my MACBACKUP folder, now I have all my PC’s and Mac’s backing up to it.
Thanks Allot
Thanks for the info. I did this for my wife’s laptop and it is backing up to the NAS right now. I can’t wait to get back home and set my computer up for this also. I was working on this for the past few days and I figured out everything except for the partition step. Thank you for taking the time to explain everything, I wish I would have looked on the web first instead of wasting a few days.
Thanks, I got this working with a Lacie ED mini. You might want to change the title of this post since you’re not really hacking the DNS 323 as much as you’re making a poor man’s time capsule! Anyway thanks again!
Micah, thanks. Great point! This isn’t really NAS specific.
So far so good. I am just starting my first backup… and I really appreciate the details provided. I tried to do the sym link but no joy…. any pointers on how to enable that would be much appreciated.
Cheers!
Greg
Greg,
What’s the issue with the symlink? Any error msg?
Hi, I’m new to Mac’s, and I’m trying to use my Dns-323 as a time machine for my Mac book. I seem to be stuck on step 20, I tried writing the symlink command the way you have (with my names instead of yours) but it still tells me “no such file or directory exist”. I think its to do with the part of the command that says “hd_b2”, I don’t know what that is, or what it is supposed to be for me.
Please help, thanks
Hi,
I ve encountered a problem namely:
I can not restore whole time machine backups using the os x install dvd.
The steps sofar:
Because you are not using an ‘official’ time capsule, you have to mount it
first in terminal to get it work. (seen by the installer as a possible backup source)
Because I am using the samba protocol in os x I tried:
mkdir /Volumes/Timemachine
mount_smbfs //name:pw@ip/path /Volumes/Timemachine
gets some error I dont remember.
Didnt work out, some sites suggest to use AFP, but I dont remember our precious dns323 supporting AFP without making your hands dirty.
Any1 got a simple solution, I am so happy I got transmission and TM running, dont dare to experiment with
unstable solutions.
Greets Chris
@ Qruisse; Woah, seriously? I will admit, I haven’t actually tried *restoring* from a time machine backup. Possibly a high-risk “epic fail” on my part — A good backup solution is worthless unless you can successfully perform the recovery procedure.
Please keep us posted on how you make out!
I am in the midst of building a new Mac (hackintosh) system — I will do some time machine backup/recovery testing on that new box when its built and post my results.
In the meantime you might want to check out superduper — I know a ton of people swear by it. Of course, this all assume you have a working Mac at the moment, and are not in a failure-restore scenario.
Good luck!
I wanted to restore it cz my HDD got fragmented (I use bigger files files then 20 MB)
and I read on 1 of the forums that when TM is restoring files he defragments the partition. I cannot make a partition with bootcamp if my HDD is fragmented.
BTW if you cannot restore from the partition why backing-up?
I mean this guide is great but if there is no solution to mount the dns323 back without installing AFP then it is pretty useless to use TM, just incase you are stupid and deleting files randomly. (I am trying out a lot of software from unknown origin,
thats why I am doing the backups. To restore my WHOLE HDD to the moment before I installed a crappy software. )
All in all, OS X is great, but lacks some pretty basic functions like : why cant he defrag my disk if I want to make a bootcamp partition? :S
Question: is Time Machine making backups of the windows partition aswell?
that would be a nice feature.
Qruisse: We can install AFP on the DNS-323, and allow TM to communicate to it via AFP instead of SMB (samba). Would that fix it, and allow you to restore?
Maybe see here and here.
Yes probably, AFP should mount the dns323.
The problem is I have everything working now (except restore and apache web server) and all according to your guidelines.
If I start messing and have something done that I can not undo, I have to start all over again.
(besides there are no guides to follow, you havent made them yet :P).
Keep me posted if a new guide is out. Lighttpd php mysql would be appreciated, nevertheless AFP
Qruisse: dude, I’m not the only one hacking up these NAS boxes — check out the 323 Forum.
To install AFP, follow the instructions in TimN’s original post here. Test it out and let us know how it works in the comments here! We’re all one big happy NAS-hacking family
I will let you know how I make out once I test the restore with my new mac in a few weeks.
Wonderful!!! You had the missing piece of information that I required to get this thing working. I couldn’t figure out how to resize the partition properly until reading your guide! I can’t thank you enough, Cheers for the beers!!
Hi, there -
Thanks a lot for the information, it was very helpful. I got a couple of questions though -
1. On DNS-323 (firm version 1.06) I failed to get access via ssh. I was getting message:
“…ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.196 port 22: Connection refused”
I probably missed some settings on DNS 323… ( But I failed to find one on the first scan…).
2. From above: “… 7. Encryption - up to you”… I tried to make one with 256-bit encryption.
Everything went fine until TM decided to mount the disk, just before actual backup.
At this point, mount failed…
I’m wondering if anybody tried to make above to work with an encrypted image.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Have a great day,
Michael.
@michael: did you hack the 323 and enable ssh, according to my first article in the series? (see the rest of my blog). Not sure about encryption. Never tried it.
@michael / all
if you are using encryption, you need to copy the password within the keyring-management-tool from the ‘userspace’ to the ’systemspace’ ..
sorry, my mac is in german, so i try to translate .. the wording in english is not exact the same ..
so, go to programms -> utility programms -> key(ring)management (in german: Schlüsselbundverwaltung)
there you find the key/password for your created image, e.g.: .. somename.sparsebundle
copy this entry to ’system’ (you find ’system’ entry in the left menue. for copy/paste use right-klick).
hope this helps ..
maybe someone with a english mac and more time can describe this more exactly / with the correct translation
short description in german / kurze Anleitung in deutsch:
das passwort für das erstellt image muss in der “Schlüsselbundverwaltung” aus der Liste “Anmeldung” in die Liste “System” kopiert werden. Einfach mit rechts klicken und kopieren / einfügen. (Ansonsten kann Timemachine das Backupimage nicht selbstständig öffnen).
(Die Schlüsselbundverwaltung findet sich unter “Programme -> Dienstprogramme”)
Viel Erfolg ;)!
Ok… I am close to getting this to work. I go to resize my image, but the button is disabled. Did the latest OSX updates change something? I’m going to start over from scratch to see if it works.
Scratch that last comment, I was able to resize no problem. (I think I had to unmount the volume first.)
Anyway, I’ve finished the procedure, including hacking Time Machine to allow all drives visible.
However, I am only seeing my Parallels (windows) drive now, and I’m still not seeing my DNS 323. Am I missing something? I have m system connected by SMB. I’m running the latest firmware. I’ve repeated the directions twice.
This screenshot should explain everything: http://screencast.com/t/wepJ3DdbE33
I’m open to any ideas!
I restarted my computer again, and it worked. I was installing the latest security update during this, it may have had something to do with my troubles. thanks for the great guide.
Great guide - everything worked out well after the first try.
Thanks for an end of 2 hours try and error
Great stuff! Worked like a charm… until i decided that being wireless for the first backup would take too long. I turned Airport off, connected an Ethernet cable to my router and now TM isn’t able to mount the backup disk image.
I’ve browsed to the DNS 323 Volume through Finder, but TM still fails.
Any idea?
Is this because now that i’ve shut Airport off I’ve got a different MAC address that what I’ve used when I created the disk image?
I’m not able to install AFP on my NAS (Smartdisk Sohonas). Is it confirmed that you can’t do a restore if you only have a Samba solution? No workaround?
Awesome writeup. Appreciate the time taken to write this. Works like a charm!
I have a quick question. This is working for me nicely.
Without any thought, I gave a 1 TB size to my sparse bundle. Now I would like to shrink this to 500GB.
How do I do it?
Thanks
@Venky, I don’t know; never tried resizing after writing data to it. Maybe you could try running steps 14 and 15 again, and see if it works. Let us know how you make out!
Thanks for writing this up but I still have a problem. I have an IOMEGA NAS and followed your instructions. It seemed to work great but then locks up after copying anywhere from 500kb to 10gb. It locks up the whole computer. When I restart TM says there was a network connection failure or a error 26. Any ideas?
I have started this setup on a Western Digital My Book World Edition (version 2)… 1 TB drive. Time Machine sees the drive and acts like it wants to back up. The backup process starts, but always stalls out at about 47.1 to 55 MB into the backup. I am backing up over wifi (802.11g)… could that be an issue? I was really counting on using this drive for Time Machine - so I am growing concerned if this will really work or not. Suggestions?
Very well written procedure. I was able to get my Time Machine working with DNS-323 in less than 15 min. Thanks a lot.
Very detailed and helpful procedure. I was able to set up my DNS-323 to back up wireless (macbook pro DIR655@802.11n DNS323) using Time machine.
Some feedback:
-On step 20, when ready to ssh the DNS-323, I’d recommend doing an ls -l /mnt first to see your volumes and simlink to the proper volume. In my case the volume was HD_a2
-When you finish the procedure, make sure that when you access the share or server where your sparsebundle file is, you check the box “Remember this password in my keychain”. I was having problems with TM mounting my backup volume, and doing this solved my problem.
Thanks again for sharing this great information.
Progress on restoring a TimeMachine backup from the MAC OSX Install DVD
Please visit this WIKI:
http://wiki.dns323.info/howto:mac_osx_users
@cmos: awesome! let us know how the bare metal restore via AFP works out!
Worked well, I was able to boot up from the restored USB drive. one caveat though: when you restore a time machine backup to an external USB drive for test purposes and then you decide that your backup I good so you want to boot from your regular drive again. Time Machine forces a full backup for some reason..
Great work ! I had found a very detailed page about setting up a linux box to do the job but the part explaining that one may have to build the disk image was not detailed.
Thanks to your work I could do it !
Question regarding resizing @steps 14-15 : does it really limit the max size of the whole TM backups (I hope so) or will it be able to push that limit ?
I have seen TM building sparsebundle files on an xserve and it does not appear to have a size limit other than the hard drive hosting the files.
Has anybody run into any problems with Snow Leopard?
As far as I can tell, I’ve done everything correct with setting up the sparsedisk image, and I’ve placed in on the DNS-323 root correctly. I still Get the same 45 error as described above, and upon investigation I get a log very similar to that Dave got above where basdically, Time Machine is looking for the wrong file.
However, Looking at the network drive during the time maching backup and it’s trying to create a sparsebundle image named MYMAC.tmp.sparsebundle - no MAC address.
So I change the sparsebundle image name to Mymac.sparsebundle, try again, and time machine creasts Mymac 1.tmp.sparsebundle. So I create another file mymac 1.sparsebundle, and it creates mymac 2.sparsebundle.
You get the idea. Has apple created a very small code to prevent this hack on snow leopard?
At any rate, I’ve followed this tutorial to a T - several times. Only differance is I’m runnning SL.
Any suggestions?
This worked Great!!!! I had bought a 1gb Maxtor Central Axis about a year ago and never was able to get it to work with Time Machine. Thanks again for a wonderful descriptive post.
I am trying to set up 2 independent TM backups for my IMAC and Macbook AIR.
I have followed your well detailed procedures for both:
in the IMAC case they worked just fine the first time
in the AIR case I have tried 4 times, the DNS323 Volume 1 never appears as an option in TM
Both computers run MAC OSX 10.5.8
I have tried in both cases wired and wireless connections with the DNS323, no difference in the option which i get when I press Change Disk in the TM panel
I have a DNS323 and a DIR655 wireless router
With both systems I can see the DNS323 Volume 1 mounted on their desktops
What could be the difference between the 2 systems?
Thanks, pepi
Aaron - Check this out : http://www.lone-gunman.be/2009/12/19/time-machine-network-drive-snow-leopard-update/
Man, you are THE DEAL. This worked flawlessly on Snow Leopard the first time I tried it. THANKS ALOT BRO!!!
Hi Guys
Have you try this in a terminal :
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
It will let you choose existing network share when configuring Time machine …
I’m wondering if someone could help me with the differences in the above detailed description on how to get Time Machine working with something other than a Time Capsule…etc.
I have a Pro, Belkin N and a WD 1TB My Book External Drive.
The My Book is formatted in FAT to allow both my Mac and other PC’s to access the same storage device.
Will Time Machine work with this setup if I follow the above instructions?
Thanks,
Ham
I just wanted to chime in saying that I got this working with my Dlink DNS-323 as well. Thank you very much for documenting this … it’s very helpful.
I’m sure it’s been discussed before but I simply wrote a script that mounts the Backups share every time my Mac boots or wakes from sleep. Here’s a page I wrote on how I did the same thing to mount my Music drive.
http://imclumzy.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/mac-osx-automatic-smb-mount-script-using-sleepwatcher/
Thanks!
Great work, man!!
I will post a link in my website!
@Admin,
Question how did you get your dns-323 to show up under shared on your mac? I running firmware 1.8 on it can’t not seem to have it show up? Any help from you or anyone would be cool
thank you,
rob
Maybe someone else seen this problem… I can’t seem to get the dns-323 to show up under Snow Leopard Share. I running firmware version 1.8 and I have reset to factory, I’v done a hard reset.. still not able to see the it under share..
Does everyone device show up under share right out of the boxs? Please let me know if I’m doing something wrong
Rob
@rob: If it doesn’t automatically show up in the Finder, hit
If you don’t know the IP address of your 323, you can find it somewhere in the admin interface of your router. You could also set it up as a static IP address so you don’t have to search for it if it gets assigned a different IP when the DHCP lease expires.
Hope that helps.
I found that it works only if your computer name does not have any spaces in it (I got rid of the apostrophe too). Sticking to computer names that result in a Linux-compliant filename for the sparsebundle is probably a good idea.
I tried this on Snow Leopard and when I did the “tail -f /var/log/system.log | grep backupd”, it shows that it is Resizing the backup disk image from 476.8 GB to 1374.3 GB (I had created a 512 GB sparsebundle). Any clues on how to prevent the resizing?
Never mind, I was impatient. It still shows the 476.30 GB available once that process completed.
And here I am again - it does look like the sparseimage got resized to 1.34TB upon subsequent backup attempts. Any advice?
FINALLY got this to work on my Snow Leopard MacBook Pro!
key missing step for getting this working up and running for me: installing AFP.
Essentially follow Steps 1-6 from http://wiki.dns323.info/howto:1st_steps
Then enter the following commands…
cd /mnt/HD_a2/ffp/pkg
/ffp/sbin/funpkg -i netatalk*
/ffp/sbin/funpkg -i db42*
Then do Step 4 from http://wiki.dns323.info/howto:appletalk
Thanks!
My volume doesn’t show up in Time Machine? Any thoughts?
Oops…skipped a step
Found this which helps create the sparse bundle - http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=184462