This seems like a good solution to managing the size of Entourage backups, although rather complex. However it's not clear how this solution deals with the fact that both Entourage and the database daemon need to be shut down. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946961

If understand correctly, if either of those programs are running during a backup, you risk creating a corrupted snapshot. True, you can go back to an earlier snapshot and hope for the best, but you've still lost your most recent data. Furthermore shutting down database daemon isn't a trivial task for end users. What are the options?

1) Use Database Utility to turn off running database daemon whenever Entourage isn't running. 'Course then, you need to worry even more about database corruption.

2) Implement one of the solutions over at mvps.org, such as: this or this. These make local backups of the database; in the context of this trick, those local backups are what you'd put on the sparse bundle.

Either way you need to get users to quit Entourage every once in a while, and if they don't--you either get no backup, or a good chance of a corrupted backup.

Add in the complexity of full implementation and I see this, overall, as useful only for (1) power users managing their own machines (2) small numbers of Mac users in a business site (3) a developer out there who can package a solution.

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