Running time machine on a network drive

I am running time machine on my QNAP TS-109 for some time now. I had a few problems with the AFP share not being accessible after a while for which i found a good solution (see other post).

Enabling time machine to use (non TimeCapsule) network drives is a piece of cake. Just enter this command in a Terminal session “defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1”. Once done, you can pick any share you created on your drive to use for time machine backups.

Works really well,  put down here so i keep note of it 😉

AFP Problems with QNAP TS-109

UPDATE: The QNAP is being replaced now. It constantly kept failing (i.e. not reachable anymore from the network requiring to set it up again) and I do not want to put up with it anymore. QNAP out – Synology in 😉

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I constantly ran into this problem and i want to keep track of it here. When you use AFP on the QNAP TS-109 drive, OS X will put a few hidden folders onto the shares that at the end keep the QNAP from working.

In my drive, they simply lock up and mount the whole HDA_DATA partition as readonly. I am then not even able to delete the .AppleD* directories using “rm -rf .Apple*” as it will only produce an error message.

Solution:

– turn off AFP and Bonjour services for AFP

– on all your MACs execute this command in a shell “defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true”

– cd to all directories with shares (e.g. /share/HDA_DATA/Qmultimedia) one by one

– execute “rm -rf .AppleD*

[CORRECTION] Busybox somehow does not properly do a “rm -rf”, so i am doing this now to remove only the DS_Store files: “rm `find . | grep DS_Store`”

– on readonly error, it helped to kill all hd_util processes which seem to have got stuck

– execute a check of the partition (it should produce a message in the log)

– reboot NAS (to make sure)

– turn AFP and Bonjour back on

This worked for me – to be honest i left the drive for a whole night to make sure all checks really finished.