Network Time Machine backups on 10.6.x

One of the nice things about 10.6 is how much better Time Machine backups perform. I’d had set up Time Machine on 10.5 to back up to an Time Machine AFP share, which was hosted from one of my home 10.5 servers. Performance was not great, and I had issues with Finder occasionally beachballing or being herky-jerky while Time Machine was making a backup. Eventually, I turned Time Machine backups off and resorted to backing up my account’s home folder with rsync, using RipCord.

When I upgraded to 10.6, I decided to give network Time Machine backups another try, and I’m glad that I did. Once Time Machine did the first backup (which ran overnight, due to the fact that it was backing up 50 GBs over a WiFi network), Time Machine has behaved very smoothly and most of the time I don’t even notice that it’s done a backup until after the fact.