Wednesday 16 December 2009

Update: using Time Machine on a network drive with Snow Leopard or Leopard

I now have much simpler instructions thanks to Jon who commented on my previous blog post. Forget all those icky complex command lines! Here's the simple way...
  • download the CreateBackupVolume application from Jon's excellent backmyfruitup project
  • run it - tell it how big to make the sparse bundle thingy
  • a sparse bundle file then gets created on your desktop (the name of the file starts with your machine name)
  • mount your network drive if its not already
  • drag the sparse bundle onto your network drive (you can delete the local one)
  • set TimeMachine to use your network drive
  • wait :)
I've repeated the above now on 3 different macs including one old G4 and it worked like a charm each time. It seemed kinda faster than my previous Time Capsule too :)

Many thanks Jon! Using Time Machine with a network drive just got loads simpler!

Update: these instructions should work on any Mac with Time Machine, so it works just fine on Leopard too

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I don't know what this apple script app has over the other 5 apps and different terminal commands I did over the last 4 hours yet this is the one. Snow leopard will not even show a network drive unless it has a correctly formatted sparsebundle. Also the time machine default write for unsupported volumes is not needed anymore. Further more enabling it when not needed made TM sys pref hang on me! Thanks again! Grr now the thing sees it but doesnt do anything....