The majority of us don’t backup on a regular basis. It usually isn’t until we lose a bunch of critical data that the light bulb turns on and we start backing up for maybe a week or two and then we stop. Apple’s new Leopard operating system contains Time Machine to fix that problem. Time Machine runs in the background, backing up your entire hard drive without you having to remember to manually run a backup.

This was one of the niceties which excited me about upgrading to Leopard; however I was somewhat disappointed to learn after upgrading, that Time Machine would only backup to another physically attached hard drive. In my situation I primarily like to place my backups in a remote location such as a networked server. I work of a laptop, so my physical working location is always changing and I’m not going to carry an external drive with me all the time. Luckily, after a few hours of research I found a nice tweak to let me use our office network servers as my backup location.

Here is how you do it:

REQUIREMENTS
Obviously you need to be running Leopard and you’ll need a network share which is larger or equal to your hard drive in your Mac. In my case these shares are in SMB and AFP.

1. Go into Applications / Utilities and open up terminal
2. Copy and paste this command into terminal (all on one line)

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

3. Hit enter / return
4. Mount your network share, in my case my share is off our server called INAS1 and my share is called User-Backups
5. Go to System Preferences and open Time Machine
6. Click on Change Disk
7. Select the share you wish to backup to, I’ve selected User-Backups
6. That’s it, you’re done

Wait up to 15 minutes and you should be set. To verify it is working open up your network share in Finder and you should see a file which is named [your computer name] [your MAC address].sparsebundle

Be sure you post any comments or questions about this method.