Apple’s time machine is a brilliant app. The only downside is that you can’t (apparently) backup to a network share… thats what I thought, now I’ve found a way.

This worked for me, but ITS NOT A DOCUMENTED WAY (ie: use at your own risk).

1. Mount the network share (I have a share at work on Windows, and at home on Linux – both work).

2. Open iterm and run the following (all on one line!);

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

3. Start time machine preferences, click “Change Disk” and you should see your network share, set as a target as you normally would.

I found that sometimes time machine can “forget” the share, then wont let you backup to it, to get around this reset the parameter using the following (all on one line!);

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 0

Follow step 2 again, and all should work – I guess this is the slightly buggy side of things, and why its an unsupported method. Hopefully an update will address this soon, as its really handy if you already have a NAS/storage and don’t want to spend cash on a Time Capsule.

Enjoy

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