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Make Time Machine use a Local Volume as a Network Volume
Authored by: patrickfergus on Mar 11, '14 09:08:01AM
Some thoughts about this hint:
This introduces obstacles to anyone wishing to make copies of a Time Machine volume.
Apple's KBase article HT5096 ("Time Machine: How to transfer backups from the current backup drive to a new backup drive") says drag and drop copy of an existing Time Machine backup should be OK, as long as the target disk is formatted appropriately. However a sparseimage backup would be more flexible when copying existing backups to not-appropriately-formatted volumes.
Unfortunately, Time Machine will not back up to a local directory, but instead requires an entire volume be dedicated to backups.
Time Machine doesn't require the backup volume to only contain backups--other data can be stored on the volume beyond the backups. Or is this statement saying "the only thing Time Machine will back up to is a hard drive (volume) or a network-based Time Machine share, and I want it to back up to a specific folder on a specific drive"?
Further, Time Machine will utilize as much free space as possible on the volume.
This is also true for network-based/sparseimage backups--they will expand to fill up the file share. However one could set up quotas to limit the size of backups. Can the hint poster expand on the goal(s) for this hint?

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Make Time Machine use a Local Volume as a Network Volume
Authored by: hamarkus on Mar 11, '14 03:49:43PM

"Time Machine doesn't require the backup volume to only contain backups--other data can be stored on the volume beyond the backups. "

(1) TM requires to be located at the root of a volume (you can only select a volume as the destination in the preferences, not a folder on a volume which in effect cause the TM backup to always be at the top level of volume).

(2) Unless you manually delete older TM backups, TM will fill up the target volume completely eventually. Which in the end means that the volume gets turned into an almost read-only volume for other data because you can only read (or delete/move) other data from it but cannot put other new data onto it because the volume will be filled to close to capacity. Of course, you can always manually delete the oldest backups when you need more space for other data but it is an extra step that has to be repeated periodically.



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Make Time Machine use a Local Volume as a Network Volume
Authored by: jollyroger on Mar 13, '14 12:10:57PM

To my knowledge, Time Machine will back up to:

* a local volume
* a shared network volume

but Time Machine will not back up to:

* a folder on a local volume
* a locally mounted sparsebundle disk image

While it may be true that you can make a file copy of the "raw" file system of a Time Machine backup destination from one GUID HFS-Journaled file system to another GUID HFS-Journaled file system, a sparsebundle disk image is a much safer option when you may be dealing with various different types of file systems or different transfer methods, since it is completely self-contained. This is why I personally prefer to back up to disk images as opposed to "raw" file systems.

You can limit the size of Time Machine sparsebundle disk images such that Time Machine cannot expand them past their current size by locking the Info.plist files within the bundle (chflags uchg backups.sparsebundle/Info.*). I suppose I should have included this in the hint (though I believe it's already been posted elsewhere). Also, as suggested, you can use various methods to set up quotas for local shared folders. For instance, if you have Mavericks Server installed, you can set individual quotas for shared Time Machine backup destinations in the Time Machine setup panel.

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Jolly Roger
Edited on Mar 13, '14 01:08:53PM by jollyroger



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