Any experiences using Time Machine backup to Windows network drive?

Any experiences using Time Machine backup to Windows network drive? My situation is the following. I have an external HD (320 GB) and where I've set-up Time Machine backups since about 2 month now. I really love it except for the reason that my external HD is not network-capable. So for doing backups I have to manually attach the ext-HD (via USB) to my MacBook.
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 472

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Guest [Entry]

"I do Time Machine backups for two MacBook's across the network using SMB and Windows Home Server and have had no problems. It is tricky to configure however once running it really works well. I have had no major issues except forgetting to set my exclusion list correctly, and Time Machine runs happily over wireless and wired LAN.

After the initial configuration it has really been set and forget. There is a ServerFault question here with links and details on how to set it up. It mentions WHS specifically but will work for any Windows Server Setup or even Windows XP/Vista/7 client machines using SMB shares. Just remember to enable the guest account for sharing."

Guest [Entry]

"Once upon a time I had a setup that was tweaked to allow a Mac to do Time Machine backups to a file hosted on an SMB share. (Time machine sets up a sparsebundle disk image file that appears to your Mac as a standard HFS volume.)

I found that this setup was very fragile; I abandoned it when I experienced corruption of the sparsebundle which caused the backup to go poof. Also it was incredibly slow. It took more than a day to do the initial backup of <20gb of data.

I've since retooled to mounting the share over AFP and have found that to be much more resilient to network and backup interruptions. I'm backing up to a FreeBSD server though, so I can't advise you on how to do that with Windows."