That's right! TonidoPlug can now be used to back up your Mac using Time Machine. It's been tested on Mac OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard. The TonidoPlug's drive doesn't even have to be HFS formatted - it's been tested and works on ext2/3, but should also work on NTFS. Just hook up a big drive to your TonidoPlug and follow the guide:

1. Mount the TonidoPlug/MediaDisk share in Finder. Connect as the Guest user.

2. Open a Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)

3. Run this:
4. Make sure Time Machine is turned off, and run in the Terminal:
5. You'll need to make a disk image that backups will be stored on - change the "200" to whatever size (in gigabytes) you want the maximum Time Machine Backup space to be. You might also need to change "MediaDisk" to wherever you mounted the TonidoPlug share:

6. Open up Time Machine in System Preferences and select the MediaDisk drive. Wait for the backup to start and have fun!

Your backup might fail if your computer's name contains apostrophes (which is default in Mac OS X). Change your computer's name to something simple (I named mine "Mac" in System Preferences/Sharing) - and re-run the makeImage command.

Thanks for this info, but I'm having trouble with the set up.

First, I had to use curl instead of wget, as OS X doesn't have wget installed.

Then, when I'm at step 5, I cannot seem to enter the right volume. I keep getting the error "./sh: no such file or directory"

When I look in Time Machine, my TonidoPlug share shows up as a possible drive, but I didn't want to select it for risk of Time Machine trying to write to the plug itself, rather than the mounted USB drive, or erase other data on my mounted USB drive.

Any help on how I can enter the correct volume path/directory at step 5? Is there a way to list the tonidoplug share directory path in terminal?

If you mounted the TonidoPlug share on your desktop, just use that name - like /Volumes/[[what is says on your desktop]] instead of /Volumes/MediaDisk. I believe the newer TonidoPlugs no longer call it MediaDisk, which is why you're seeing this error.

I had some difficulties in implementing this solution on Leopard (10.5.8), but I did eventually get it working. Some problems I ran into, and their solutions:

UPDATE TO FOLLOWING:


UPDATE: After re-implementing this on another Mac, I figured out the issue. It looks like this is *only* a problem the *first* time TM goes to backup. Once TM has found and started using the .dmg this script creates, it doesn't matter if the share is mounted or not-- it will continue to happily connect up, mount the .dmg and run backups. Again, once TM has gotten itself all setup and running, you can leave the Tonido's SMB share running and TM will happily create a new connection, run the backup, and disconnect.

2. I don't know if the following was a problem with how I followed the above instructions or if it is simply an issue between 10.5.x and 10.6, but Time Machine didn't recognize the sparseimage created by this script, instead trying to name it both based on my Mac's name ("Athena") and some random glut of numbers/letters (e.g., "Athena_2340ufe0d0239.sparsebundle"). After letting Time Machine mount the drive, fail at creating its own sparseimage, and stop, I simply looked through the output of Console.app to see what junk it was trying to add to the filename and renamed the original sparseimage that this helpful script created to what Time Machine had been trying to create. After ejecting the share and running Time Machine, everything seems to be working just fine.

Again, I suspect much of this has to do with my own inability to follow these instructions well in addition to the differences between 10.5 and 10.6, but I thought it would be helpful for 10.5 users who might be experiencing any of these same issues.

This integration break once you upgrade your OS to Lion OS.

Check viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3274

I haven't found any solution yet.

SD