10.5: One way to use Time Machine and a backup server

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10.5: One way to use Time Machine and a backup server
Authored by: Fisslefink on Thu, Apr 3 2008 at 12:12AM PDT

Here's a potential workaround for the too-many-files-for-rsync problem:

I believe Time Machine can mount a sparsebundle on the local disk for backups (check me on this). If so, you could create a 100 GB sparsebundle (similar to the original poster's suggestion of a 100 GB partition) for local Time Machine backups. This way, those mllions of files are tidily wrapped up in 8MB 'bands' within the sparse bundle. Rsync is quite capable of doing incremental updates of sparse bundle bands (I have tested this).

Just make sure you have a version of rsync on the server that supports the -E flag (I had to compile from source on my old Red Hat box), or when you restore the sparsebundle, it will be recognized as a folder instead of a volume. If you have this problem, use the 'setfile' tools in the developer package to make Finder see it as a 'bundle' again.