Automated backups for Windows machines has been a staple of Windows Home Server since it was first released and in Windows Home Server 2011 that core functionality has been preserved. Microsoft had planned to support backups of Mac OS X computers through the Time Machine feature however Apple removed the ability to do so by axing support for SMB network drives.
This time around, Windows Home Server 2011 offers support for Mac OS X insofar that the management aspects of the operating system can be more easily accessed from an Apple computer but native backup support is still missing. Luckily, there is a free add-in being developed by Orbital Technologies that will fill in this gap.
In a nuthsell, the add-in executes what you would have to otherwise manually execute in the way of creating a sparse file, created reference to MAC addresses and hooking Time Machine up to the server. You can check out more information as well as screenshots here.
This feature plus the release of the Drive Bender beta has very much ticked all the boxes to start planning my upgrade of our existing Windows Home Server (including decommissioning and the older drives which have been spinning for up to four years non-stop and consolidating data on to fewer higher density drives). Whilst I won’t be risking the current setup with beta software I am looking forward to the final releases of all of these pieces of software.
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