Physics Hacker

If you ever wondered how to do a Time Machine backup to some NFS, AFS or SMB volume, here is the solution:

In the terminal (Terminal.app) enable Time Machine to use unsupported volumes:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences  TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Now you can use any mounted device! This is especially nice if you are working in a company or in a research group where you often already have some remote storage available.

All these GUI stuff drives me crazy – sometimes. I just wanted to burn a CD during working on my old iBook. Do I really need to install some new program or do I have to use some ‘on-board’ tool and click-here-click-there? Most of you will have installed some tool and you just do a click-and-drop, but I don’t and anyway I am more used to the tools ‘cdrecord’ and ‘mkisofs’ on Linux. Here is how you can create and burn disk-images on OSX with a shell. The shell command for this kind of task is

hdiutil verb [options]

So, this tool can do a lot for you e.g. possible ‘verbs’ are create, convert, burn, etc… I will just write what i did to burn a CD: First I created a new disk-image

hdiutil create -format UDTO -srcfolder folderWithData diskImageWithData.dmg

uhh, and now just burn it!

hdiutil burn diskImageWithData.img

Ok, thats cool. You can also eject, mount and convert disk-images. For example you start with your backup SPARSE disk-image and convert it to a ISO image and the burn it or whatever. Have a look at the man-pages for all verbs and options.