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10.5: Make Time Machine work with AirPort and AFP disks
Authored by: odaigle on Nov 05, '07 04:46:32AM

I see a potential issue of using a network drive with TM. Here is what may happen:

1) The backup is made on the server into a sparse disk image, which has a size that is much greater than the physical disk itself. Example: I'm backing up on a 1.5 TB raid disk attached to a linux system though SMB and the sparse disk image created by TM has 2.73TB of capacity.

2) The incremental backups are made, filling up the server drive.

3) TM wants to backup more data and deletes old backups. However, as the backups are kept in a sparse disk image, the space on the physical disk is not freed. Thus, TM is never able to free space for more backups. Backups hangs.

One solution would be to be able to set a maximum size to the disk image that is lower than the physical disk size. However, I did not see this option. I also tried to create a sparse bundle disk image of 300GB and tried to use it as the backup device, but TM did not show the disk image as an available backup device (even though I had the .com.apple.timemachine.supported and .00xxxxxxxxx file onto it).



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