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Andrew Stephens · May 9, 2008, 02:26 PM

I've set up three of these for various colleagues recently and not one has worked out of the box. The worst problems seem to be when backing up more than one Mac to a TC. It seems that one of the Macs always seems to struggle.

Anyway, on this Mac these mysterious items apear each time the backup kicks in. Any ideas why?

CharlesS · May 9, 2008, 06:50 PM

If you're referring to the icons on your Desktop, that's just Time Machine mounting the .sparsebundle disk images that are at the root of the Time Machine drive. It seems that when using Time Machine over a network, the backups get stored inside a sparsebundle disk image rather than as a normal folder on the disk, presumably because AFP may not be able to support creating hard links, ACLs, and other features required by Time Machine on its own.

Andrew Stephens · May 10, 2008, 01:34 AM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

If you're referring to the icons on your Desktop, that's just Time Machine mounting the .sparsebundle disk images that are at the root of the Time Machine drive. It seems that when using Time Machine over a network, the backups get stored inside a sparsebundle disk image rather than as a normal folder on the disk, presumably because AFP may not be able to support creating hard links, ACLs, and other features required by Time Machine on its own.

Surely the sparsebundle should be stored on the time capsule. Very little point in having a backup and then storing vital information on the host Mac. Indeed the Mac right next to this one is backing up to the same TC without creating these mounted drive icons and the TC I set up in another colleagues house doesn't do this either.
Given that this was the second backup and there are now two icons I'm guessing you'd be left with a desktop full of icons before too long.

CharlesS · May 10, 2008, 02:23 AM

It is stored on the Time Capsule. You can browse it if you want to have a look. The .sparsebundle images will be at the root of the drive.

There should be one image for each machine that's backing up to the TC, so I wouldn't worry about the images multiplying (unless you add more computers that back up to the TC).

Andrew Stephens · May 10, 2008, 02:37 AM

OK. I get that and I can indeed see the sparse bundles (x2) on the TC itself but why has it decided to mount them on this one Mac and more importantly, is there a way to stop it as it seems like anomalous behavior compared to the other TC's I've seen.

Thanks for the input so far.

Over all I'm thinking TC is only 75% there. All the installs I've done have had massive trouble with the initial (and I'd guess most important) backup even using ethernet. An initial backup over FW option would be good.

moep · May 10, 2008, 08:33 AM

TM always mounts the sparsebundle locally when backing up to a remote server.
If you find the Diskimage Icon on your desktop annoying, there's a way to hide it even while it's mounted:

macosxhints.com - 10.5: Hide the Time Machine volume in the Finder

I had a similar issue (using a third-party NAS and had to create the sparsebundles myself, so the backup volume always showed up while TM was running) - this fix works great for me.