Changing the sparcebundle size

WD Legacy Products Other Network Drives
1

Hey folks, I’ve got a question about the sparcebundle that used for the TimeMachine backups.

I’d like to somehow change available space on the volume, so that time machine didn’t eat my entire hdd. I’ve got a 1TB drive in my MBWE and time machine thinks that it has 1TB of disk space. More weirdly, it somehow says it has 600GB of data on it, which seems like the size of other stuff in my Public/Downloads directories (the time-machine backup is almost empty)

So, I’m wondering if there is a way to change the size to say 300GB and be shure that time-machine won’t exceed it.

And there is another thing. Can I somehow use an encripted sparcebundle on MB? I tried to create an empty sparcebundle on my mac, then push it in /DataVolumes/.timemachine via ssh and replace the original Macintosh.sparcebundle with the new one, but somehow it doesn’t work.

Can it be done at all? Maybe it just needs some adjustments?

Thanks,

Nikolay

2

I know you can set a quota for individual users and shares, but it doesn’t apply for the default shares…

3

Just in case someone is wondering the same question. I think I’ve got a solution.

Assuming you’ve got your netatalk things working (timemachine sees the storage and backs the stuff up)

  1. Open up Finder, then Go → Connect To Server

  2. Enter ‘afp://’ click ‘Connect’

  3. It will request for login/password, enter ‘WD_Backup/your password’

  4. Now it should mount the net drive to /Volumes/WD_Backup

  5. Open up a terminal and say ‘cd /Volume/WD_Backup’

  6. run ‘ls -l’ in there, you should see the ‘Macintosh.sparsebundle’ file in there

  7. run ‘hdiutils resize -size 320GB Macintosh.sparcebundle’ 

That did it for me. After that TImeMachine sees the correct 320GB bundle size

Cheers,

PS: Still wondering if I could somehow replace the sparcebundle with my own encrypted one