Using Time Machine with a Buffalo LinkStation (CH/CL Series)

I’m not going to get into the details, but last week we had a bit of a data catastrophe in the Jerzakie household.

The potential data loss finally influenced me to buy a NAS for the house. I’ve been running on a crusty old Windows 2000 Server box now for probably 7 years, 40 gigs just isn’t cutting it anymore.

After a short time shopping, and a good recommendation from Andy, I bought a 1Tb Buffalo LinkStation EZ. It says that it works with Time Machine, and the iPhone, and iTunes and all that jazz.

Tonight I got it and got it all set up. The instructions from Buffalo are … to say the least.. lacking … severely. Thanks to another tutorial and my own lack of following directions, I had the NAS working with Time Machine in just a short while.. Below are my awesome instructions.

Things You Will Need (and need to do):

1. A Buffalo LinkStation that natively supports Time Machine (CL/CH series)
2. A Mac (or two) with OSX 10.5.6 or higher
3. A lot of time for your computer to sit.
4. SHUT TIME MACHINE OFF ON YOUR MAC
5. Delete the share you created on your NAS 5 hours ago that you haven’t gotten to successfully work yet.
6. Go into the Time Machine tab in the NAS and disable it.

Creating your image file

Because you aren’t using an actual Apple Time Capsule you will have to do a couple of things yourself. Not hard..
You need to create a disk image to backup to. Weird, I know, but it’s how Time Machine works.

Open Terminal on the Mac (go to Spotlight and type Terminal… there it is). Type the following line

ifconfig | grep ether

You will get 1-2 lines, the first or only line is the MAC address of the WIRED Ethernet port. Regardless of which you will use to backup (wired or wireless) Time Machine needs the MAC of the WIRED port.

Copy that to TextEdit or something.. or write it down.

Now, go into System Preferences > Sharing
In the box at the top you see your computer’s name, below it is the name you will need to use for TM (Time Machine). If it’s complicated and stupid, click EDIT and change it to something easier. I used “MikesMBP” it will automatically add .local on it, that’s fine, let it be.

Now.. here’s where we create the image (sparsebundle).
Open your new friend Terminal again. Type the following…

hdiutil create -size [SIZE IN GIGS]g -fs HFS+J -volname "[VOLUME NAME]" /[COMPUTER NAME]_[MAC ADDRESS WITH NO COLONS].sparsebundle

WTF?!

Ok…

• SIZE IN GIGS : You can set a max size for the bundle, I used 200 that seemed like plenty.
• VOLUME NAME : Anything you want, I used “Mikes Backup” very creative, I know.
• COMPUTER NAME : This is the name from above (the one below the box that you may have edited) don’t add the .local so just “MikesMBP” in my case
• MAC ADDRESS WITH NO COLONS : Ok, that crazy crap you copied to Text Edit, it’s that… when you remove the colons it should look like 00b443e684f2 or something… so.. the line above, when you are done should look something like this…

hdiutil create -size 200g -fs HFS+J -volname "Backup of Mikes Computer" /MikesMBP_0019e5582bd1.sparsebundle

After you hit enter it will sit for a minute then say that the file is created … TADA!

Setting up the NAS

Very little actually needs to be done on the NAS, thankfully.

First, make sure that your NAS will work with the Mac. Click on Shared Folders > Service Setup and make sure that Apple Talk is on.

Open the NAS admin, go to Shared Folders. Create a new folder called “TimeMachine” or something , it doesn’t matter. Make sure that the share is accessibly via Apple Talk. Save your changes… da da da.

Go back to your Mac. In Finder go to Network, browse to the NAS, you will see the folder you just created. Open it and copy in the sparsebundle file you created above. DELETE THE SPARSEBUNDLE FROM YOUR MAC WHEN IT’S DONE COPYING.

** NOTE ** I have two Macs, to use both in TM, just create a sparsebundle unique to each machine and upload them to the folder. Do this for BOTH machines before moving to the next step.

Back to the NAS web interface…

Click on the Time Machine tab in the NAS. Click the Enable option and select the folder you created a minute ago. Hit apply .. tada.. done with the NAS.

Wait about 2-3 minutes before moving on. This may be a good time to get something to drink.

Getting Time Machine Working

Ok… open Time Machine on the Mac, turn it on.. it will ask you where to backup to, it should find the TM share on the NAS by itself. Once it does, just let ‘er rip. It will be “preparing” for a long time, mine were 10-20 minutes (on a wireless connection).

The backups will start, and it’s on like Donkey Kong.
The backups on wireless are slow, but after the initial sync they are incremental and shouldn’t take so long.

Spend some time setting up the Options in Time Machine, exclude stuff you don’t need, it’s a waste of space. If you’re smart and you keep everything dear to you in you /Users/Your Name folder then you will have an easy time recovering when your piece of crap Hitachi hard drive decides to grind the heads into the platter. Good times.


Hope that helped everyone!