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I have a iMac. I have attached an external disk through USB port, and would like to use TimeMachine to create a backup on the external disk. I want TimeMachine to create a sparsebundle backup file on the external disk. But TimeMachine allocate whole disk for TM backups, not creating a sparsebundle. How to solve this?
Thanks Barney! What I would like to do is:
No way to go around this?
Right my Pro and Air are using the external disk on my iMac without any problems, and stores the TM files as *.sparsebundles.
But my iMac doesn't, he want to format the disk and store the backups as in my attached pic. I have tested different disk format. But you are probably right about, my iMac don't think the attached external drive is a network disk, as my Pro and Air are doing.
Attach one external disk to my iMac and share that disk in my network as backup disk
That will work for multiple network backups.
• But TimeMachine on my iMac want to format that disk and keep him to himself
No way to go around this?
You can attempt to create another Volume on that drive in Disk Utility, then see if Time Machine will use it. However, when I tried that, it wouldn't use the volume. I had to partition the drive, creating a second Container.
Disk format APFS, not case sensitive.
One container.
One volumes.
MacOS version on MacBook Pro Montery 12.1. MacOS version on MacBook Air BugSur 11.6
But, there are no problem for my Pro and Air to backup to the external disk on my iMac. It's only my iMac which is tricked, he wants to format the disk.
FWIW, local external disk Time Machine backups in Monterey leverage the APFS snapshot feature which is quite different than network based Time Machine backups. Network based backups use the traditional Time Machine backup paradigm since servers manage their file systems in different ways depending on the operating system used and likely may not support APFS.
You can try creating a new volume on the existing drive and let the iMac's Time Machine use that. It will format it as APFS,case sensitive and will make it read only except iMac's Time Machine can write to it. I would be hesitant since you may mess up the backups for the other two Macs.
Also see:
Thanks all!
I do understand I'm trying to do something impossible.
Case closed!
Time Machine will only create a Sparse Bundle Disk Image on Network backups.
Is the disk format APFS, case sensitive? If not what is format?
If it is how many containers?
How many volumes?
What macOS version on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air?
How to create TM sparsebundle file?
