Using XP's Backup with Time Capsule

[Chap Harrison]

I have a Time Capsule that I'm using with Leopard's Time Machine. As discussed elsewhere, I've excluded the 30 GB Parallels/WinXP .hdd file from Time Machine's backup. What I'd like to do is make XP responsible for running its own incremental backups, writing them to Time Capsule.

I turned on File Sharing (AFP, FTP, SMB) in Leopard. Since TC is essentially an "external HD" to Leopard, it appears as Network Drive (X to WinXP. That's how I understand it, anyhow. Then I fired up the Backup utility that comes with XP, and told it to write its .bkf file to X:\MyXPBackup\. It's doing its initial backup now -- very slowly: Time Machine typically gets data rates of 4-6MB/s, whereas the XP Backup is getting more like 200KB/s. In addition, TM backups are now failing ("The Backup Volume could not be mounted"). I'm suspecting that the reason may be that XP's load on the drive is causing slowdowns and timeouts, rather than there being some kind of exclusive lock that TM requires on the TC -- but again, what do I know?

I'd like to hear comments and alternative suggestions. I think it's reasonable to ask XP to do its own incremental backups, and to have it write them to a folder on the Time Capsule, but I'm uncertain of how best to have Leopard/Time Machine and WinXP "share" the Time Capsule HD.

Thanks,
Chap

 

[Chap Harrison]

Quick reply to my own post: I found a place in Airport Utility in which to set up File Sharing for the Time Capsule disk! There's a special section for Windows sharing, in which you specify a Workgroup name. I don't know what that is, but I've seen the name "MSHOME" used in that connection, so that's what I entered. From XP's Network Places I was able to find MSHOME, which contained my Time Capsule disk. I'm currently backing up from XP to TC at 3-4MB/sec. Not only that, but Time Machine backups are completing normally at the same time.

My scheme had been to treat TC as an "external HD" attached to the Mac OS X machine, which XP was mounting as a network drive. I can easily imagine that this caused two network hops for every XP -> TC transmission: one from XP -> OSX, and another from OSX -> TC.