Sparse images - do they expand?

[sepstein]

Title says it all. I followed the instructions in the User Guide for my first backup, and now I can an error that I've run out of room when trying to do a smart backup.

I'm backing up to an NAS drive.

If the images do NOT expand, how much larger than the drive should the images be set at? 10% greater? 30%?

Steve

[sepstein]

O.K., from what I can see when trying to create a new sparse image, they ARE supposed to expand. And I have plenty of room on my NAS for expansion. So question is why am I getting an "out of space" error.

Steve

[dnanian]

Images expand to the point where they've reached their maximum size, which we set to the size of the source volume...

[sepstein]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Images expand to the point where they've reached their maximum size, which we set to the size of the source volume...

Sorry, that seems a little cryptic.

I have 1.5 TB available on my NAS to back up a 250 GB drive.

The smart backup failed, and seems to have occurred when it thought it ran out of space.

The sparse image is 232.57 GB, which is what Get Info in the finder reports is the actual size of the hard drive I'm backing up.

Any idea what might be going on?

Steve

[dnanian]

I don't really have that much to go on, but the Troubleshooting section of the User's Guide help explain how these things can happen...

[sepstein]

It's unfortunate that the solution seems to be "start over again," aka "erase, then copy." Defeats the purpose of smart backup.

I'm wondering if this issue might be addressed in a future update

Steve

[dnanian]

It's something we're looking at for the future, Steve.