So as much as people say “Time Machine won’t do this because the bundle might not be mounted next time, and then it has to back up the whole thing again”: Time Machine is happy to back up my USB sticks without any issues. Whether they are there or not on a given backup.
> On Sep 26, 2017, at 12:52 PM, Arno Hautala <a...@alum.wpi.edu> wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 2:00 PM, Michael <keybou...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Hmm. Diskutil info reports that it is backed by a sparse bundle. So the >> system does track that, and time machine could see that. What I need is a >> block device loopback device, and a way to feed that sparse bundle to that >> block loopback, so it would look like it was on a block device instead of an >> image file. >> >> Any idea how to do that? > > lolwut!? But seriously, no idea. You could probably do something like > that by implementing your own FUSE plugin, but I'd be surprised if > anything like that exists. Sparsebundles are already mountable and I > doubt many people are going to take the time to re-implement it. This > is about the time that some pops in with a link to exactly such a > working project. I’m looking for a block device loopback. Give it a mountable disk image, it behaves like you’re reading a real block device, without the system seeing that there’s a file image behind it. Can’t be that hard. If I knew Fuse, I could probably write it -- it sounds like a "hello world" level of program for it. >> The point of putting this file system in a sparse bundle was to make sure >> that the next time it dies / needs to be recovered from an online backup >> (backblaze) was to ensure that file meta-data is saved properly. At the same >> time, I want to have a local history backup so that I don't have to worry >> about downloading if I don't have to. (2/3rd of the disk is for time >> machine, and 1/3rd is for this stuff). > > So, my reading is that you're backing up to a sparsebundle because > that that will preserve the metadata you care about. I think I'd look > instead at to another backup tool. Backblaze has the best online backup available. And nothing beats the whole "In the event of a whole drive failure, we'll ship you a drive that you can restore from". I was previously putting my time machine onto a sparse bundle, and that was being backed up, so that if my drive died, I could restore from that. Sadly, the backup performance of the sparse bundle went downhill so badly that I had to abandon that. How does the whole "network time machine into a sparse bundle" system manage to work, or is it always going to be slow? Or is it just hidden by the network speed? (And in fairness, it would not have helped. The drive that died? This stuff had grown too big to fit on the time machine with the backup of the internal. New drive has 2 extra TB, so I figure I'm at least a year before that happens again :-). _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
