I am trying to setup my EX487 with an additional (2) 1TB drives to backup my son's mac via Time Machine. When I go through the setup process to create the disk space, the process seems to flow fine, however the backup partition it supposedly just created isn't recognized. I am trying to create a 300 GB partition for this backup. I played around with things and it looks like the largest partition that it will create and recognize is 90 GB. Is there a limitation built in on the total space it will allocate for Time Machine backups? 90 GB is not nearly big enough for my needs here. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

It should be able to create a volume up to the maximum free space on the system drive (somewhere around 700gb.) 300gb is a lot of space, how much data on your mac are you planning on backing up?

I thought there shouldn't be any limit, besides that of the total space available. Which is what has me so perplexed. Why would it only allow me to create a 90 GB backup space? Anything larger than that doesn't get recognized by Time Machine. My Mac currently has about 150 GB of data on it. I know that the 300 GB that I want to create is twice that of what I have currently, but my EX487 has a little more than 2 TB available so I figured why not. Should allow me to have TM backups for quite some time.

Hm... I simply used the HP MediaSmart control panel (through my iMac) to create a 300 gig portion for my Time Machine backups. Took a couple mins to set itself up, then things were smooth.

Are you using the Mediasmart software that came with the EX485 to do this? If you install the Mac client it will detect whether or not a Time Machine partition exists, and it will let you change the size of it. I easily set mine to 200GB and about 30 minutes later the partition was built. I can even set it to duplication if I like.

Are you trying to do this manually through the WHS control panel or through Server 2003 drive manager? Neither of these will work, as it sounds like you are finding out.

I set up a 90gb folder and after that completed successfully, I immediately redid it at 200gb and it works. It seems to be very slow in setting up the initial backup. Hopefully, it won't take as long when it is only updating from day to day.

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djsprat

Initial backup is always slow, because it collects all current data on selected disks, whereas afterwards it collects only changes in FS, which are much smaller.

Agreed, the first backup is painstakingly slow but, depending on how you are hooked up to your network, the future ones go very quickly. I specifically bought a wireless N router with Gigabit for this reason. This way my wireless backups are almost as fast as any wired ones.

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Marc

EX475 - 5.5 TB Total - 3.5TB MSS w Rosewill RSV-S5(2TB Backup Pool)- LE-1640 (AMD X2 BE-2350 unstable) - 2GB Ram
2.5 Unofficial Software Update/Time Machine Backup
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24" iMac, 2 MacBook Pros
2 Apple TV's