I haven’t tested that method yet between my MacPro and MacBook but I don’t think that will work. Unless you are able to select the HD of your Mac while setting up TM to save the sparsebundle. But as far as I know, OS X doesn’t allow you to.

Thank you!

For those out there that are having problems with Snow Leopard, here is an update with some stuff I ran into.

http://www.lone-gunman.be/2009/12/19/time-machine-network-drive-snow-leopard-update/

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thank you.

Here is how I made it work.

My MAC address was wrong. In system information it doesn’t display a MAC address for the airport card for some reason, so I had chosen my ethernet NIC. No good. You can try doing an ipconfig in terminal, or, just copy whatever the MAC address is that time machine tries to create it self. Forget about the .tmp. thing, it doesn’t matter, ignore it. Once I did that, I suddenly had problems creating a disk image bigger than the local hard drive on my laptop that I want to be able to use time machine. The problem is that I forgot to create the image in the order suggested above. You cannot set the custom size until after you’ve selected sparce bundle. Also, you cannot create the image across the network, you have to create it locally then move it to the drive on your server.

These are all in the directions, I just thought I was being fancy trying to skip steps. The directions above are correct and work, I can confirm. Thank you!

Also, when you say to check the permissions, do you mean that everyone and the primary user should have read and write access? I noticed that the tmp sparse bundle time machine creates has no access, should I change mine to be the same?

Thank you so much for helping all of us with this!

let me try to clarify this for you.

As far as I know, the name of your sparcebundle needs to have your computername and nic mac address. A mac address has nothing to do with Apple Mac. It is a unique identifier assigned to your network card.

To get that information, click on the apple icon and select “About this Mac” . Then click on the “More info” button. The name of your mac will appear in the top left corner.

To get your mac address. Click on the “Network” section in the left side content table. You can either select the “Airport” service of “Ethernet” . Both of those selections will show you your Ethernet MAC address. It will be in the form of: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx .

Now you have to combine the two of them. Lets say you have a macbook with the name “Craig Wood’s MacBook” and your network card has 12:34:56:78:90:11 as you MAC address, your sparsebundles name would be like “Craig Wood’s MacBook_123456789011.sparsebundle” (without the quotes).

I hope this will help you out. I’m allready running this setup for about 5 months without problems. (TimeMachine helped me out a couple of times by giving me back access to some files that I threw away but still needed).
I’m still running MaC OS X Leopard (10.5.8) , but I guess the procedure will remain the same for Snow Leopard. I’ll be able to tell you for sure hopefully next week when my new Mac Pro Octo Core gets in.

Craig