Thursday 3 December 2009

Using a network drive with Time Machine on Snow Leopard

I bought one of these after my TimeMachine died and figured it'd just work with Time Machine. After some messing about it still didn't work & I was left scratching my head so I started to look for backup software alternatives.

Then @dancres pointed me at these awesome instructions on how to do it. The only trick is the sparse band size needs to be changed on Snow Leopard as mentioned here.

So the only change from the above instructions is the big meaty command I used to create the sparse bundle was this (my changes in bold)...
HN=`hostname | cut -f1 -d.`;MA=`ifconfig en0 | grep ether | sed "s|:||g" | cut -f2 -d' '`;hdiutil create -size 350g -tgtimagekey sparse-band-size=262144 -fs HFS+J -volname "TM_$HN" $HN\_$MA.sparsebundle
Then rsync it to your network drive as per the instructions above and it just works - yay!
rsync -avE mymachinename_12345.sparsebundle /Volumes/Whatever
(in the above you use the real generated sparse bundle name, and the real name of your network drive volume :)

1 comment:

a said...

James, I have a nifty tool to create the sparsebands...

http://backmyfruitup.googlecode.com/

You need the Create Backup Volume automator action in the downloads section.

The source is up there too if you want to look at it.