User Tools

Site Tools

This documentation is no longer maintained by the Turris team (although it can be used by the community to share content). The current official documentation is at docs.turris.cz.

Create a Time Capsule for OS X's Time Machine

Assumes that a Samba share has been created and mounted on the Desktop:

Commands are execute in Terminal window on OS X.

1. Get the computer's name and save it in a variable:

  $ HN=`hostname | cut -f1 -d.`
  $ echo $HN

2. Get the network adapter's address:

  $ MA=`ifconfig en0 | egrep ether | sed "s|:||g" | cut -f2 -d' '`
  $ echo $MA

3. Create a variable for the time capsule's name:

  $ TC="TimeCapsule_$HN"
  $ echo $TC

4. Change to desktop folder:

  $ cd ~/Desktop

5. Create 500GB sparse bundle (change size if desired)

  $ hdiutil create -size 500g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -encryption AES-128 -nospotlight -fs "Journaled HFS+" -volname "$TC" $HN\_$MA.sparsebundle

6. Change the file's permissions to make is 'world read/write'

  $ chmod -R 777 $HN\_$MA.sparsebundle/

7. Copy the sparse bundle to network share

  $ rsync -avE $HN\_$MA.sparsebundle/ /Volumes/raid/Time\ Capsules/$HN\_$MA.sparsebundle/

8. Enable time machine's support of remote volumes

  $ defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

9. Mount the sparse bundle by double-clicking it:

10. Set time machine's destination to the time capsule

  $ sudo tmutil setdestination "/Volumes/$TC"

11. Start Time Machine's backup