May 22, '08 07:30:00AM • Contributed by: joey03
Many have expressed the desire to partition the internal hard disk in their Time Capsule -- presumably because they wish to limit the amount of space allocated to Time Machine backups. I myself wanted to do this. Thanks to these instructions on the ReadyNAS Community site, I believe I have found a solution that uses their method and builds off of it.
Note: although it is working for me, this is not guaranteed to work, it may contain errors, and it is not for those who are unfamiliar with working in Terminal. I also do not offer tech support -- you're on your own.
With those provisos, here's the how-to...
- Disable Time Machine in the Time Machine System Preferences panel.
- Find the MAC address of the machine's internal Ethernet port with ifconfig en0 | grep ether in Terminal. This will return one line of output, which is the MAC address for the Ethernet port, which will be a string of letters and numbers, for example, 00:16:cb:af:91:d7.
Even if the network backups will be done using a different port (e.g. AirPort: usually en1), the system will use the MAC address of en0 as part of the system identifier. If your computer's (not your hard disk's) name is MyMac, the identifier that Time Machine will use will be (using the sample MAC address above) MyMac_0016cbaf91d7. - Create a new sparsebundle directly on the Time Capsule share. Decide how many gigabytes in size you want it to be, and substitute the figure you want for 125 below (be sure to append the g for gigabytes). The easiest way to do this is to type after the prompt:
Next, press the Space Bar, and drag the Time Capsule volume appearing on your desktop directly from the desktop into the Terminal window (assuming you have the Finder set to display connected servers). Then type in the sparesebundle name as calculated above. So if the name of the Time Capsule volume is david, the final command should look something like this:hdiutil create -size 125g -fs HFSX -volname "Backup of MyMac"hdiutil create -size 125g -fs HFSX -volname "Backup of MyMac" /Volumes/david/MyMac_0016cbaf91d7.sparsebundleNote that in place of david would be whatever the name of the particular Time Capsule volume you have chosen. (I use Secure Shared Disks » With Accounts" under Disks » File Sharing in AirPort Utility, so volumes for each account name are created). Hit Return now, and you should see a message similar to this:created: /Users/david/Mac_0016cbaf91d7.sparsebundle - Double-click that .sparsebundle file residing on your Time Capsule volume, and it should mount.
- Launch Disk Utility, choose "Backup of MyMac" in the Disk Utility sidebar, and click on the Enable Journaling button. The reason why I do this is that, in the course of testing, I found that Time Machine created .sparsebundle files which when mounted had filesystems that were both case-sensitive and journaled, and the hdiutil command apparently doesn't allow one to create a .sparsebundle file with both of these attributes simultaneously.
- Unmount Backup of MyMac.
- Open the Time Machine System Preferences panel, and select Backup of MyMac as the new destination for Time Machine backups.
- Turn Time Machine back on in this same System Preferences panel.
