Dear all,
I have been in love with my TM/TC configuration, due to its simplicity and great GUI, well, all up until now. I have just finished a call to the Swedish AppleCare people who have confirmed that there is no solution to this issue; I intend to hook up the backup of a new MBA to my existing TC using TM. I've had my first Mac running in this configuration for some months, and the TC space is all used up. It seems that there are no controls for making the TM on one machine reduce its sparsebundle, in order for another Mac/TM to have enough space to make its first backup. Also, several Macs/TMs would seem to 'compete' for the space, so that the first machine to acquire a large set of file space will then keep it, as it only erases old backups for its own needs. Thus, even when the next Mac/TM would get a sparsebundle in place, allowing TM to run successfully, that space might be small and prevent the TM service from being useful. Proposed solutions: (1) I would love to have known this when I first configured my system, as I would have used partitions to prevent this issue. Thus, I propose modifying the instructions for setting up TM. (2) I wish that there is a control of some kind that can be used to force particular Mac/TM to reduce the size of its sparsebundle file (using the same TM lets-clear-some-space-algorithm, preferrably).
Regards,
/Jan Wickenberg