To use Time Machine to make a backup of your Mac, you need any of these types of storage devices:
- External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac) or AirPort Time Capsule
After setting up the storage device, you can use Time Machine to make a backup of your Mac. And after making your backup, you can use Time Machine to restore files from your backup.
External drive connected to your Mac
Time Machine can back up to an external drive connected to a USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire port on your Mac.
External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac) or AirPort Time Capsule
Mar 27, 2012 Synology's two-bay DS212+ NAS drive is a full-featured speedster with an outstanding operating system. The network-attached storage (NAS) box.
Network Attached Storage Time Machine Compatible
Time Machine can back up to an external USB drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac model) or AirPort Time Capsule.
- Make sure that the USB drive is formatted for Time Machine.
- Connect the drive to a USB port on your AirPort base station, then turn it on.
- Open AirPort Utility, then select your base station and click Edit to view its settings.
- Click the Disks tab in the settings window.
- Select your backup disk from the list of partitions, then select ”Enable file sharing”:
- If more than one user on your network will back up to this disk with Time Machine, you can use the Secure Shared Disks pop-up menu to make sure that they can view only their own backups, not yours. Choose ”With accounts” from the menu, then click the Add (+) button to add users.
- Click Update to restart your base station and apply the settings.
AirPort Time Capsule
Time Machine can back up to the built-in hard disk of an AirPort Time Capsule on your network.
- Below are the Devices that are great options for who are looking for and interested in build your NAS server at home or office. Related Readings Personal Cloud Storage device for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch Free Best Online Backup service for Mac in 2019 – Windows PC Best cloud storage for iPhone.
- Mar 15, 2016 If you don’t fancy selling your old Mac for a decent price, you’ll probably want to repurpose it so that it’s not sitting around doing nothing.If you haven’t yet sorted out some network-attached storage (NAS), you might want to think about using your old Mac as a jumped-up fileserver.
Mac shared as a Time Machine backup destination
To use another Mac on your network as a Time Machine backup destination, complete these steps on the other Mac:
- Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Sharing.
- From the list of services on the left, select File Sharing.
- From the list of Shared Folders on the right, Control-click the folder that you want to use for Time Machine backups.
- From the shortcut menu that opens, choose Advanced Options.
- From the Advanced Options dialog, select ”Share as a Time Machine backup destination.”
Network Attached Storage Definition
When setting up Time Machine on your other Mac computers, you should now be able to select the shared folder as a backup disk.
Network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports Time Machine over SMB
Many third-party NAS devices support Time Machine over SMB. For details, check the documentation for your NAS device.
How to format a disk for Time Machine
Best Network Attached Storage For Mac
Time Machine supports all Mac OS Extended (Journaled) formats and Xsan formats. If the disk isn't using the correct format, Time Machine automatically prompts you to erase it when you connect it to your Mac:
If you need to erase the disk manually, use the Disk Utility app to erase using the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
Time Machine can't back up to an iOS device or disk formatted for Windows. And if your disk uses the Master Boot Record (MBR) partition scheme, some of its partitions might not be available for use with Time Machine.
Network Attached Storage For Mac And Pc
I've been looking at:
Western Digital NetCenter
Maxtor Shared Storage II
Buffalo Linkstation Pro
Does anyone have any experiences with the above (or others) and a Mac?
For the vast majority of the time i'm going to be accessing the NAS over a wireless network (I'm going to plug it into my router), so I'm guessing that speed is not really going to be a deciding factor; as i'll be limited to speed of my wireless network (54mbps - if i'm lucky!).
What i really want is a device that weeks as seemlessly as possible with MacOS, and ideally comes with Mac Software that will allow me to schedule backups. I'm not looking for an overly sophistacated NAS.
I've looked at the various corporate websites, but they are lacking when it comes to illustrating the 'Mac user experience'.
Top of my list at the moment is the Buffalo Linkstation Pro because it has AFP support, which i'm lead to beleive is a plus for Mac users (although i'm not sure why), but the backup software it comes with is for Windows users only. Maybe you can't have everything.