Snow Leopard™ Server

Chapter 38. Time Machine Server

In This Chapter

• Introduction to

• Time Machine Server

• Planning Time Machine

• Server services

• Time Machine Server

• setup and configuration

• Managing

• and monitoring

• Time Machine Server

Time Machine Server in Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server allows multiple network client machines to use the server as a central destination for their backups, which the server can store on any attached volume.

Time Machine backups are managed on the client side for systems running Mac OS X Leopard or later. The backup feature uses FSEvents, a background process that keeps track of file system events as they happen, to help compile a short list of changed files, enabling Time Machine to only back up incremental changes without requiring a long file system scan to determine which files have changed.

To maintain regular and efficient incremental backups that don't require special software to review the archives as most backup programs do, Time Machine relies on a feature added to the HFS+ file system called multi-links, which allows multiple folders to maintain a hard link to the same file on disk. Multi-link files are also called hard links.

Unlike an alias, or softlink, a multi-linked file isn't just a file that acts as a pointer to another file; instead, it's one file that exists in multiple directories while only taking up the disk space of a single file (because it's only a single file). One link to the file can be deleted without removing the file from the disk. The file won't be deleted ...