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

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 :)

Fuse Community days in NY & SF next week - come hear about ActiveMQ, Camel and ServiceMix

Next week we're hosting two Fuse Community day events in the states

• Tuesday 8th December - New York at the Hyatt Hotel in New York City
• Thursday 10th December - San Francisco at the Hyatt Hotel in Burlingame

If you're in the area pop by and say hello - you'll need to register on the above links.

We'll have a bunch of presentations on various popular open source Apache projects like ActiveMQ, Camel and ServiceMix. Schedule in the links above. See you there if you can make it!

Here's a flavour of what to expect, the devoxx talk I did recently.