#Imac sparsebundle update
#Imac sparsebundle mac

By default sparsebundles can keep growing until they fill up the NAS, but in this scenario we keep other things on the NAS as well as backups, and we’re going to limit the sparsebundle size to 70 GB.I could torture you now through Disk Utility, but there is an easier way via the command line: This sparsebundle is a virtual filesystem image which we’ll copy to the NAS, and Time Machine will then access it remotely (that way Time Machine’s not limited by the filesystem features of whatever NAS it’s using: all the funky stuff happens within the sparsebundle).

Make a new “sparsebundle” on a local disk (NOT the Time Machine disk!).

#Imac sparsebundle mac

AirPort: usually en1), the system will use the MAC address of en0 as part of the system identifier. Even if the network backups will be done using a different port (e.g. This will return one line of output, which is the MAC address for the Ethernet port, which will be a string of letters and numbers, for example, 00:1e:c4:b8:f9:b3. Find the MAC address of the machine’s internal Ethernet port with ifconfig en0 | grep ether | sed s/://g | sed s/ether// in Terminal.In my case the sparsebundle is named MagicDudeAir_001ec4b8f9b3.sparsebundle The sparsebundle name consists of your computer name_mac address.sparsebundle. Time Machine saves backups in a very specific format, and we will use a sparsebundle to get this done.Open up a terminal session and enable NAS support for Time Machine: defaults write TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1.Disable Time Machine in your System Preferences.I assigned a static IP-address and named the NAS MuffinStation (well, my laptop is called MacMuffin – so there) After fitting the drive back into the DS107+ case, power up the device and follow the setup-assistant.Once the drive is connected via USB, OS X will prompt to initialise the drive and the preparation is complete.

As I do not have a PC, I had to get a eSata (Vantec NexStar 3) enclosure, so that I could hook up the harddrive to my MacBook Air. To be absolutely sure, prepare/initialise your new hard-drive first.The installation was straight forward, but you should consider a number of steps: You will notice as part of this exercise that your original sparse-bundle image will be larger (in my case increasing the band-size increased the initial sparsebundle from 80MB to 1.5 gigabytes) I tried the conversion of the above and it took extremely long – I eventually wiped my old backups and started from fresh. Hdiutil convert -format UDSB -tgtimagekey sparse-band-size=262144 -tgtimagekey size=70g -o tempfilename.sparsebundle machinename_macid.sparsebundle You are able to convert your existing sparse-bundles via (change the max-size from 70GB to whatever suits you): To solve this problem instead of creating 8MB bands we will create 128MB bands (262144 times 512 bytes). Remember what I wrote? One folder with all the bands.” If your backup is > 300GB you can do the math.

If the images are created automatically by Time Machine, the size of each “band” file is set to 8MB. User joar on the Synology forum has the explanation for this: “ Those sparsebundle images that Time Machine uses work like this: They basically consist of a few files and one folder with all the payload files (called “bands”) in it.

#Imac sparsebundle update

Update : I have received a number of reports that large sparse-bundles (in excess of 250 gigabytes) fail to backup properly.

You can convert your existing sparsebundle via the following command: hdiutil convert -format UDSB -imagekey sparse-band-size=262144 -o new.sparsebundle old.sparsebundle Apple has reduced the band-sizes of sparse-bundles to 128MB. Update : With 10.5.7 Apple seems to have broken the sparse-band-size, resulting in the current sparsebundle to be unmountable. It took a few hours to “make” OS X TimeMachine to accept the NAS and perform backups – the steps below will outline what is necessary.