Creating a sparsebundle

Question

Creating a sparsebundle

I would like to create a sparsebundle file.

My question is, if I want to create a sparsebundle file of 60GB, do I need to have at least 60GB free on my hard disk, or is this simply the amount of space that Time Machine can use to fill with backedup data? (i.e. is the amount of space taken up immediately, or will the sparsebundle grow gradually to fill 60GB?).

Thanks

MacBook 4.1 | iPhone 3G, Mac OS X (10.5.5), MacBook 4.1 OSX 10.5.5 & Ubuntu 8.10

Posted on Dec 15, 2008 1:27 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 15, 2008 4:52 AM in response to PartisanEntity

A 60GB Sparsebundle will take up to 20MB in space, but when you start to backup to it it'll grow to fill up the space.

Are you going to place the sparsebundle in a partition of your computer? Or are you using the Unsupported TM Feature and backup to a network partition? A word of advice if you are: it is very unstabe, and difficult to restore your HD from a network partition. I tried and it fails, so I am using an Mac Pro to base my TM and sharing the drive to other Macs on my network. At least thats the idea. Its not working. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1822398&tstart=0

Anyways, hopefully I've answered your sparsebundle question. Good luck!

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Answer 2

Dec 15, 2008 5:29 AM in response to James Dryden

Hi and thanks for your reply.

Yes I actually wanted to backup to my NAS over wifi 🙂

The problem is I only have 17GB free on my MacBook and would like to backup my installation of Leopard.

My NAS has 1TB of free space, and I was hoping to use some of that space for backing up.

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Answer 3

Dec 16, 2008 1:40 AM in response to PartisanEntity

Okay, I have set it up to backup over wifi to the NAS.

But I will make manual backups as well just in case since I have heard contradictory things about the reliability of network backups.

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Answer 4

Dec 16, 2008 12:58 PM in response to PartisanEntity

If your NAS is connected via Ethernet to your router, a quicker way to backup would be to backup over ethernet first time round. The first time is always the longest (coz its got the whole HD to do) so ethernet could speed up your time by a few hours.

Good luck! I would do this but it didn't work for me, so I gave up. All the best and Merry Christmas!

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Answer 5

Dec 17, 2008 12:55 AM in response to PartisanEntity

Has anyone tried iTimeMachine? I just found out about it, is it more reliable that TimeMachine over a network?

http://www.xiotios.com/itimemachine.html

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Answer 6

Dec 17, 2008 2:48 AM in response to PartisanEntity

PartisanEntity wrote:
Has anyone tried iTimeMachine? I just found out about it, is it more reliable that TimeMachine over a network?

http://www.xiotios.com/itimemachine.html

Yeah, I have! All it has the same effect as the terminal code that makes Time Machine show unsupported drives.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

I think the idea behind this is a utility that will make the system ready for AirDisk backups. However, for me this simply had the same effect as typing the above code into Terminal. Try it if you want, but for me it didn't have a different effect except being able to hide the UnsupportedDrives when I didn't want to see them.

(BTW It says on the iTimeMachine website for CustomDock that this is a way for "the Average Joe" to make these changes. I assume that this is also the case for iTimeMachine. Mind you, they could have come up with a better name...)

Message was edited by: James Dryden - The whole (BTW) part added.

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