I recently got one of the new mac mini's because it can finally run dual monitors. Yay Apple. Anyhow, this Time Machine thing sounded pretty cool so I kept trying to figure out how to get it to backup to my network drive but nothing seemed to work.

I read many a web page but nothing seemed to work. However, I did get it working thanks to a bit of info from each of the following sites:

• http://smangal.wordpress.com/2007/12/10/time-machine-with-network-drive/
• http://rolf.haynberg.de/?p=83
• http://www.flokru.org/2008/02/29/time-machine-backups-on-network-shares-in-leopard/#update-2

FYI: you have to manually ''eject'' your backup volume if you ever start Time Machine.

So here's how you ''really'' do it:

1. make a sparse file locally
2. copy it to your network drive
3. start time machine

or with some details:

1. make sure you've got a mounted network drive
2. open up terminal
3. defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
4. make sure you're in your home directory (you have to create the sparse file locally)
5. ifconfig en0|grep ether, to get your mac address, ignore the colons in future commands
6. hostname, to get your host name
7. sudo hdiutil create -size 50g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -fs HFS+J -volname Backups 'your hostname'_'your macaddr' to make a 50 gigabyte backup “drive”. Note the underscore between hostname and macaddr
8. sudo mv 'your hostname'_'your macaddr'.sparsebundle /Volumes/'your network mount'/
9. optional: touch /Volumes/'your network mount'/.com.apple.timemachine.supported
10. start Time Machine
11. pick your network mount, supply a password, get backing up