On 2017-09-26, at 9:07 AM, Arno Hautala <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 11:52 AM, Michael <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I'm not going to a sparse image (which worked fine to start, but became >> horribly slow), I'm talking about taking something that is currently an >> image, and turning it into a normal directory in the time machine (right now >> it is only backed up as a disk image, not as the contents). > > I can see how to exclude volumes, but no way to explicitly include a volume. > > Looks like this isn't supported. > > https://superuser.com/questions/148849/backup-mounted-drive-of-an-image-in-time-machine
Aha! Searching (ok, reading article after article), I found this: https://superuser.com/questions/285225/how-to-make-timemachine-back-up-contents-of-any-path-or-mounted-volume?noredirect=1&lq=1 The trick: That sparsebundle mounted looks like a removable disk, like a floppy/cd/USB stick. So, you have to make it look like a fixed hard drive. Applescript: do shell script "hdiutil attach /path/to/your.sparsebundle -notremovable" with administrator privileges Make that an automator script and put it in your startup items, or put the bash equivalent into rc.local, etc -- either way, it becomes time machine-able. Now, the big caveat. If it's missing in one backup, and present the next backup, time machine might decide to back up the entire drive from scratch. ... Ahh, FOO. The comments there says it was tested and working in 10.7 and 10.8, but I can now confirm it fails to work in 10.9. Gaaarrrr .... grumble grumble grumble 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). Last restore, I found that backblaze does not save the executable bit for any data file -- broke shell scripts, etc. With a sparse bundle to fix that, the next question is keeping local backups meaningful. ... I guess the only answer is to toss the sparsebundle/bands into time machine and mount/search all the images when I need to try to find something. 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? _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
