Third Party NAS Time Machine Backups Killed in Lion

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Upgrading to Lion will for now mean that you can't back up to third-party NAS servers with Time Machine

Among a slew of other changes and upgrades in OS X Lion, it has been confirmed that the new version of Time Machine in Lion temporarily kills the option to backup to a third party NAS server.

Apple stresses the importance of the Time Machine mentality in Lion, with the Versions feature working in the same way to keep backups of your documents and other files. Killing the ability to backup to a third party NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive reflects Apple’s desire to, well, have you buy more Apple hardware.

Dong Ngo of CNET notes his experience when trying to backup to his NAS server on Lion,

“I tried the new OS with a few NAS servers in the last two days, and while Lion could still see the NAS server as the backup drive, the backup would fail to proceed, giving an error message that reads, “The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features.”

Apparently, there were also issues with third party NAS backups in Snow Leopard as well. There were several error messages and bugs with reading Time Machine backups from a NAS drive.

If you use a third party NAS server for backing up your Mac, you might want to check to see if the server’s manufacturer supports (or will support) Lion at all. For what it’s worth, Synology’s new beta of DiskStation Manager works well with Apple’s latest cat.

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