Can Time Machine Backup to Network Without Creating Images

[Gnomo]

I have leopard installed on my desktop in my home office and the mini connected to my home theater. I would like to have the mini backup to an external drive in my office, since Apple pulled AirDisk support. The drive is being shared via AFP.

However, when I attempt to do this, it wants to create a sparse.bundle on the shared drive. Is there any conceivable way to get Time Machine to backup to a network drive and not create disk images?

With all of the negative things I've heard about sparse images, I really don't want to trust my backups to them.

 

[ScottW]

A sparse.bundle is a little different than the sparse image you hear bad things about. I have been using sparse.bundle w/ FileVault on Leopard and love it. Works great, making backups of it is very easy and you can do it "live" in real time, and instead of backing up one large file, the disk image is broken up into 8meg chunks.

Plus, you need the "image" file to store files so you can do a proper restore of your system from it. I would not "shy" away form using the sparse bundle - and I don't believe you have any other option with using Time Machine.

 

[Captain Code]

There's no other option right now. I believe the reason is that AFP doesn't support some things that Time Machine needs such as permissions. AFP doesn't support changing permissions of files. On a Time Machine disk image, the files are owned by you. On AFP the permissions you get are those of the account you logged in with.