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 :)

Quick review of Leopard, the latest OS X

I finally bought and upgraded to Leopard. Am liking it so far; Spaces is nice (though with a 30" and my 17" screens, I don't need many spaces, am mostly using a separate space for mail). The neatest thing of Spaces is when you use Expose to view your spaces (I'm using the move the mouse to the bottom right corner gesture), it shows both my 2 screens aligned for each space where I can drag and drop between both screens and spaces.

I love the new look and Cover Flow on Finder; don't much use the Dock as I use QuickSilver so the Stacks stuff doesn't get used.

I've gotta wait for me to buy a TimeCapsule before I can try out TimeMachine which does look cool. Apple are so good at sucking money out of my pocket :). Am gonna have to buy an Apple TV now too.... Wonder how long before they'll support the UK on movie rentals.

So far I still prefer iTerm to Terminal due to it being able to have preconfigured named shells & starting directories (I've often got tons of shells open).

The upgrade was great; I just installed the DVD, kicked off the install and came back later and it was all completed.

So far the only real nit was bash shells lost their prompt, so I had to add this to my .bashrc

export PS1="\w> "

Not an amazing upgrade or anything, but I am preferring Leopard.

Update : I've just noticed TextEdit now opens OpenDoc files natively - nice!