Tutorials and How-tos/Use Bubba with Time Machine

From BubbaWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

It is possible to use Time Machine on Mac OS X, but there are a few caveats:

  • Apple does not make it easy to use anything other than an Apple Time Capsule or a local disk as Time Machine repository. The exact procedure thus differ for different OS X versions. These instructions apply to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x) only.
  • Note that in Snow Leopard it is no longer possible to use SMB volumes (Windows shares) with Time Machine. Your Bubba2 shares must be accessed as Apple (netatalk) shares.
  • In the following, it is assumed that a Bubba2 share is mounted as /Volumes/Public share.

Open a terminal window.

Enable the use of "unsupported" (i.e., non-Time Capsule, non-local disks) volumes in Time Machine:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Create a local disk image (change the system name to match your system, e.g. "Home iMac" or whatever it's called):

export YOURSYSTEMNAME="REPLACE with YOUR SYSTEM NAME"
hdiutil create -size 500G -fs HFS+J -volname 'Time Machine Backups' -type SPARSEBUNDLE "$YOURSYSTEMNAME.sparsebundle"

(You may also change the image size to suit your needs. It is only the maximum size; unless you fill it with backups, the actual size will be far smaller.)

Next, a special property list file called com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist specifying your platform UUID must be created within the diskimage. Do:

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | grep UUID

to find out your UUID.

Next, do

cat > "$YOURSYSTEMNAME.sparsebundle/com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist" <<EOF
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
 <dict>
  <key>com.apple.backupd.HostUUID</key>
  <string>PLATFORMUUID</string>
 </dict> 
</plist> 
EOF

where the string PLATFORMUUID should be replaced with the UUID you found in the previous step.

Next, move the disk image to the Bubba2 share:

mv $YOURSYSTEMNAME.sparsebundle /Volumes/Public\ share

(This might take a few minutes.)

Finally, open Time Machine and select the Bubba2 Public share as your Time Machine volume.

The above has been distilled from macosxhints.