Let’s do the timewarp

My Macbook comes with a wonderful invention called Time Machine which is a clever incremental backup system. If an external HDD is connected to the Mac, Time Machine will ask if you want to use this as a backup drive. Saying yes then starts the backup running. It’s all automatic and keeps hourly backups for a day, daily backups for a month and then monthly backups until your external HDD fills up. And since this is a Mac, the backup is bootable without having to do anything special.

The only problem I have is that this is a Macbook, not a desktop machine. I don’t want to plug an external disk into it just to run automated backups, I have a perfectly good Linux server that I store backups on.

Unfortunately Time Machine doesn’t support network shares. Well, actually it does, it’s just an undocumented feature, and like it says on this blog you have to type the following into a terminal

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then you go to Finder - Go - Connect To Server, connect to a network share and it’ll appear in the Time Machine list of volumes. The clever part is that a disk image is created on your network share, the disk image is then mounted on your Mac, and Time Machine does its thing. Apple like disk images

I’m currently on 13GB of 21. This is on a freshly bought MacBook that I’ve only installed OpenOffice and Firefox onto. There must be a way of stripping this down and removing some junk.

I gave my new work laptop to the technicians at work. They were in the process of scrubbing Vista off and replacing it with XP last I saw. Vista Home won’t connect to Windows Domains so it had to go.

Tags: blog365, laptop, Linux, macbook, osx, time machine, vista