Backing up to a .DMG File on Server

[Marco_Polo]

Originally Posted by dnanian

OK, Marco_Polo. I've really never seen what you're describing -- I've only seen images grow to their maximum size even though there's less data inside them. I'll be interested to hear your results. (It'd also be interesting to know if the image, before it showed this error, was created with expected sizes.)

Quick update:

For whatever reason, I could not duplicate the issue again.

I swear, the disk images were filling up my backup drive over and over again, each image growing considerably larger than the source-drive. I'd trash an image and start over and then a few weeks later it'd swell to fill up my NAS drive again.

But the problem went away. I've been backing up to a .dmg file for awhile now and during that period I've done OS updates, firmware updates on the NAS and went from SD 2.1.3 to 2.1.4. Something kicked it.

Instead of out of control disk image growth, I started getting disk-full errors -- which is what I'd ordinarily expect. And then I'd delete a few items from the disk image that I'd already deleted from the source and I could continue nightly scheduled backups until the next time the sparse image filled up.

Now, I've upgraded to Leopard and am using CCC, awaiting the SD compatibility update.