Nice trick... but my experience in that using SMB based partition for Time Machine is potentially very dangerous... read my post on apple discussions forum:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5918065#5918065

(I submitted this as an hint here yesterday, but it did not make yet...)

Meanwhile exercise extreme caution in using TM on SMB.

Basically, the problem boils down to the fact that TM is NOT able to recover freed space on a sparsebundle image... period.



[ Reply to This | # ]

Just rephrasing the last sentece
"Basically, the problem boils down to the fact that TM is NOT able to recover freed space on a sparsebundle image which is on an SMB partition. period.

Meanwhile... anybody knows why sparsebundle images (created by TM) seem to report being twice as big as the SMB partition they are sitting on ? Weird...

[ Reply to This | # ]

Based on your comment I set about testing AFP to a third-party NAS. This almost worked.

The old backups were correctly deleted (according to the log in the Console) but after deleting them I can only see one backup in the Time Machine GUI. The other backups exist properly (at least based on a quick examination) in the sparsebundle, but they are not accessible form the GUI.

This is a bit disturbing. It seems like something is really broken with sparsebundles. I don't know what would have to be different for AFP on a 10.5 machine to make this work.

I will test this later over AFP to a 10.5 machine and see if it magically works there. Otherwise it's back to CarbonCopyCloner for me and my $500 NAS...

[ Reply to This | # ]

Hi,
I have tested this and when TM filled the 50 Gig I had set the .sparsebundle size to, it successfully deleted only one backup to make place for the new one. I did not had the problem you are telling about. However, my backup partition (my SMB networked drive) was not full. It is only the .sparsebundle disk image that was full.

[ Reply to This | # ]