Domesticating the Time Machine
Read on if your requirements intersect with the following set:
- Limit the storage allocated to Time Machine, on a per host basis;
- Back-up to an AFP-shared volume, without the need for a Time Capsule;
- Case-sensitivity for your backed-up filenames;
This is a rather terse summary of various bits of information I gleaned off of the Interwebs on getting Time Machine to back up to a (potentially AFP-shared) sparse bundle, rather than volume/Backups.backupdb on a directly-attached hard drive. Too many sources to cite, and many of them are outdated or misleading, though feeding a blend of ‘time-machine’, ‘sparse-bundle’ and ‘limit’ to Google should catch most of them.
One sticking point since OS X 10.6.3 onwards—particular in the case of a locally-attached backup volume—is that Time Machine will try to resize the sparse bundle to the maximum space available. To thwart it, the only solution seems to be to lock the Info.plist under the .sparsebundle once it has been created with the desired size.
hdiutil create -size 256g -layout NONE -fs JHFS+X -volname "Backup of hostname" hostname_en0mac.sparsebundle\ chflags uchg hostname_en0mac.sparsebundle/Info.plist