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10.5: Set up Time Machine on a NAS in three easy steps
Authored by: doublelibra on Jan 26, '10 12:23:20PM

I have a theoretical question about all this. I have a NAS setup, and I just installed a 2nd drive there specifically for backups. I have 2 macs, a MBP & an iMac. I followed instructions for creating a sparsebundle disk image on the NAS drive for each machine to get time machine to work over the network, and got it to work. Since the drive is 1TB, I made 2 images at 450GB each, even though the 2 machines only currently need about 90GB & 150GB.

Now, based on advice elsewhere, I set up Superduper to back up to the same drive. This uses a similar process of creating a sparse image on that drive. Note that I say sparse image, not sparsebundle - I tried using the existing sparsebundles already created, but superduper didn't seem to want to do that, and in fact although sparsebundle is a choice in their menu, only sparse image would work. So I went ahead and did this but only with my MBP. It indeed created a separate sparse image, and it takes up the full amount of space necessary to back up the entire drive (90GB).

What I'm wondering is if I'm running the risk of quickly running out of room on my NAS drive, since I think TM will fairly quickly eat up as much space as you give it (450GB X 2 = 900 GB), and the superduper backup is taking up the full amount of hard drive space needed (90GB) to make a full backup (based on what I had read, I thought that somehow using superduper onto the same drive as your TM backups would mean superduper would 'piggy back' on TM's backed up files and only add the components needed to create a startup disk, and therefore not take up much space.) I was still hoping to also back up the iMac (120GB) with Superduper onto the same drive.

Thanks for any insight you may have!



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