So for some reason my home built Apple Time Capsule started giving me problems, errors about “operation not permitted” and such, and not backing up. Being that I’m becoming more and more backup conscious lately, I let this go on for a month or two before I finally broke down and tried to find a solution.
I think the issue might have to do with that I created the file to store the backups might have been too small, and maybe my laptop’s file on disk have grown too big for it. However, I’d think I would have made as much space available for backups as possible though. Ah well.
So when digging around for a solution to this, and of course I can’t find the page or comment right now, I found a guy who had the same problem whose solution was to dump the SMB protocol for sharing the backup file, and who went to AFP (the native Apple File Sharing protocol). He also linked to a nice set of instructions for setting it all up at:
http://www.milkcarton.com/blog/2009/01/24/Getting+Time+Machine+To+Backup+To+A+Network+Volume.aspx
Note that I had to use the hdiutil command (see step #5) create the sparsebundle on the local computer. This was needed because for some reason the Time Machine program still refused to create the backup file initially on the remote server. I couldn’t create the 450G backup file that I wanted with the normal Disk Utility.app on the mac because even though it was a growable file (ie: it wasn’t creating a 450G file, but a file that can grow to 450G) it wouldn’t let me created it on a hard drive without 450G available. Easy enough with the command line though.
End result was re-enabling Time Machine on my mac, pointing it to the new share (had to connect to it with command-k to connect to the appletalk share via afp://<ip address>), and letting it do it’s thing. Hopefully this time it’ll keep on going for a while longer 🙂 Or at least until I break down and pay the apple tax to get a “real” Time Capsule that is.