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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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