Recently we had a power cut in the office, our UPS cut out after a short time before the server could be turned off and the OSX Leopard server crashed. We ended up have the Open Directory corrupted. My first thought was can I do a system restore using Time Machine from the FreeNAS backup.
Time Machine works great but there is one problem when using it with FreeNAS. I haven't confirmed this yet because we did not end up doing a system restore using the Time Machine backup but a colleague pointed it out to me. In the previous post Time Machine OSX Leopard to FreeNAS I described how you can use Time Machine to backup to a FreeNAS box across a local network. In step 6 you need to change the following default setting.
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
This allows OSX Leopard to recognize your FreeNAS share as a Time Machine backup location. When you restore OSX Leopard, you need to boot off your install CD, the system that is used to restore will not have this setting applied and you won't be able to see your backup share on the FreeNAS box.
The simple solution is to copy your sparse image to a backup share on another OSX server or Time Capsule and then restore. This is of course a problem is you don't have another OSX server or Time Capsule.
Saturday July 11 2009 08:51 a.m.