The short answer is to look here for the instructions that finally made it all work for me. After a little “mishap” with my addressbook a few days ago (helpfully synced, empty to the net and to my phone, so nowhere had a backup) I finally figured that checking out the much touted “Time Machine” backup software from apple probably would be a good idea.
Course, being that I use my laptop 99% of the time on my lap on the couch, having a external hard drive connected would kinda suck. Also I’m not paying the apple tax to get the Time Capsule hardware when I have a plethora of unused external disks here.
So what I did:
- First step was get one, plug a 500G disk into my linux workstation.
- Format it as ext3 and mount it in a safe place
- Find the disk’s UUID
- Put it in /etc/fstab
- Find the disk’s UUID
- Make it a share in Samba
- Mount it under leopard and make sure it automounts.
- Follow the instructions here to tell Leopard to allow unsupported mounts (the defaults write… command) and test.
- In my case it failed, and I got the “backup disk could not be created” error, so I followed the rest of the instructions to create the sparse image and copy it to the samba share.
- Test again, correct typeos.
- Run the Time Machine config to select the share. Wait for the long ‘processing’ to finish.
- Success!
- Run backup.
I now feel a little bit safer, and get to use the funky Time Machine interface 🙂