So… After many weeks of having my 500 G USB harddrive, I finally decided to connect it up to my Mac mini server. I want to have my OSX Timemachine to automatically backup to that drive. At first I keep on getting an error from the time machine after a few seconds of running.

The backup disk image could not be created

After searching on the net a bit … I found my solution.

1) mount the network drive
2) Select the network drive in the Time Machine Preference.
3) Run Start Backup
4) and look in the network drive that you are connected to in Finder and see what the file name is.
5) The file name should look like machinename_{hex number}.sparsebundle then turn off time machine
6) copy the name and open disk utility under applications/utilities
7) Under disk utilities create a new image.
8) Save the file as machinename_hexnumber that was wrote down in 5
9) Set the volume size to the size of the backup drive size. It can be smaller then the drive. I used 320 for my 500 gig drive
10) Volume format to Mac OS extended Journaled
11) partitions set to no partition map
12) and finally set image format to sparse bundle disk image.
and click create

Once the image is created in the network drive, run timemachine and back up now.

It will take a very long time the first time… but that’s it…

So who needs time capsule?