After recompiling netatalk the other day in order to get it to work with Leopard, the next step was getting Time Machine to make backups over the network (and a wireless one by the way).

Problem is: despite the netatalk-powered network shares worked great for “regular” files, when Time Machine started preparing the backup it always gave me an error.

Googling about it I’ve found several stories with different soluctions, some of which worked for some people, some others didn’t. The one that did it for me is this one:

• Time Machine backups on network shares in Leopard

Basically it consists in creating a “sparse bundle” disk image on the local hard drive using MacOS X’s Disk Utility, giving it a specific name, moving it to the network share and then configure Time Machine to use that share.

Worked for me.

A small detail about Time Machine I hadn’t thought about before: this article recommends removing all the virtual disks from virtual machines like VMWare, Virtual Box, et al. from the backup.

Makes sense: Time Machine works at a file level, in the end it’s just something like this but with an über-posh interface. So every time you boot one of your VMs, some small change will inevitably be made on some file inside it, causing Time Machine to store a new copy of the full virtual disk.