LinkStation Mini and Time Machine (OS X)

I recently had my hard drive crash and figured it is time to set up a proper system backup. I decided to get an NAS device to use for file sharing and backup using OS X Time Machine software. I bought a 1 TB LinkStation Mini, which has dual-drives, capable of RAID 0 or RAID 1. I thought this would be easy to set up, but so far have been very wrong. The LinkStation has been OK to set up, a little quirky… they say it supports Time Machine, but did not work out of the box for me. Thankful that LinkStation offers free 24/7 support, as most of my free time is after 10PM these days.

TIme Machine (TM) is the most quirky, picky software from Apple I have ever used. Took some effort to get TM to recognize the drive, and then received error 45 — could not create the sparsebundle. A google search makes it clear that this happens A LOT. Solution is to create the sparsebundle yourself and copy it onto the target disk. As it turns out, I probably would have wanted to do this anyway, since I wanted to limit the maximum size of the TM backup, and there is no other way to do this. If TM creates the sparsebundle, it will allow the backups to fill the entire disk, no way to limit it.

I found several pages which walked me through creating the sparsebundle, links below. However, I am surprised that Apple released this software that:
1) … is so flaky to create it’s own sparsebundle, even though I can create it manually with two commands in the terminal.
2) … does not allow one to limit disk usage, so that the drive could be used for other things as well.

http://www.mactimes.info/2009/05/how-to-use-time-machine-with-buffalo.html

http://www.levelofindirection.com/journal/2009/10/10/using-a-networked-drive-for-time-machine-backups-on-a-mac.html

So far I like the LinkStation, I am pleased with their support, you can check out the product if you like.

Buffalo Technology LinkStation Mini 1 TB (2 x 500 GB) Compact Network Attached Storage LS-WSX1.0TL/R1