Time Machine does not work over the Internet

This might not come as a surprise to you, but I’ve been experimenting just to see if Time Machine might be able to backup my dad’s (Gunnar’s) MacBook and my girlfriend’s mom’s (Mia’s) MacBook over the Internet to my 10.5 Server. It isn’t.

I started the experiment in December. Mia’s backup had succeeded three times, all on December 17, for a total of 17GB. After that, Time Machine had shown progress bars and everything, but only completed four partial backups for a total of 40MB. Fourty megabytes in two months, all of it trying to backup /Applications.

Gunnar’s backup never completed even once in the same period. The .sparseimage was four megabytes, and the only transferred file seemed to be the alias for “User guides and documentation” that appears in the volume root of some installations. He had also reported that Time Machine frequently showed progress bars.

I really expected it to work, since, you know, it’s just a TCP link and the underlying network shouldn’t matter. The server is reliable and very rarely offline, and the MacBooks relatively often awake and online. Unfortunately, it seems Time Machine’s error handling is severely lacking. I suppose the only recommendation I can make is for them to get a Time Capsule each, if they want to continue using Time Machine; otherwise I might be able to use incremental Super Duper over the ‘net.

Me and my girlfriend have tried a whole host of backup apps by now. Homebrewn cron-driven rsync scripts (works great for mysql/svn backup but not large data quantities on mobile clients), Déjà vu (psync, ueherrghghhh!), Synk (just plain bad, all versions), CrashPlan (written in Java, ugh, sooo slow!), Carbon Copy Cloner (old and not incremental) have been tested but they all failed spectacularly one way or another. We’ve considered several more (PsyncX, ChronoSync, iBackup, SuperDuper!, …) but discarded them after reading the specs and a few reviews. Time Machine is buggy and slow, but so far the only backup solution for the Mac that we’ve found that works.