I finally have something to post here.

I’ve been playing around with trying to get my Macs to back up to my home-built Windows Home Server and I finally got it to work successfully, so I wanted to post about my learnings in the hope that someone else might find them useful.

First, let me give all the technical credit to this blog post here on MediaSmartHome.com which contains all of the information you need to set this up – with screenshots even.

Official word from Apple is, of course, that This Won’t Work and it will strip the paint from your house and possibly harm your household animals.  So with that disclaimer in mind, let’s proceed.

I wrote a simple bash shell script to do all of the Time Machine set up steps which essentially means gathering a bit of system information, then building a disk image (DMG). There is a parameter in the script (properly labeled) which controls the size of the DMG.  You must make the DMG larger than the drive(s) you want to backup.  If you have a 100GB disk, you probably want to make the backup disk, say 150GB. (Don’t worry though, the DMG won’t actually be 150GB until you store that much stuff inside of it.)

The work of actually stashing the DMG on your home server I leave to you, the reader, mostly because I can’t read your mind about where the backup DMG should be placed.

Once that’s accomplished, open the Time Machine system panel, and select the WHS share where you want to put your Time Machine backups.  Then enter the username/password associated with that WHS share when prompted and you should be good to go.

It took my Mac Book Pro about 14 hours to store 50 GB across the wireless network at my house and the MBP was about 10 feet from my access point.

Your mileage may vary. If it breaks, you keep both pieces.

One other learning: I found that if my backup operation were interrupted and the status showed as “failed,” the easiest way to get my Mac Book Pro to re-attempt using the WHS share was to reboot the Mac and repoint Time Machine to the proper share location again.  The reboot was necessary because the DMG file did not cleanly unmount and Time Machine believed that it was still a valid mount even though it was not.