How to limit space used by Time Machine

Question

Many folks in these lists have asked if they can stop Time Machine using all the space on a partition, so they can put other data there too. I grew a partition to make more space and found Time Machine would not use it. This is because it initially creates a Sparse Image with a size set to what is available at the time. Even though the Sparse Image does not occupy all that space until needed, it will not grow past that maximum. In theory it should be possible to fiddle with hdiutil [http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/hdiuti l.1.html], but that is risky since it is not clear how finiky Time Machine is over this. It does seem to 'fail safe' - that is if anything has been tampered with, it is inclined to refuse to proceed. So try the following:
1) Create a filler file on your volume to occupy the space you do not want Time Machine to use. A (non-Sparse) disk image will do nicely. Check that only the desired Time Machine space is showing as free.
2) Connect to the volume from the machine you wish to back up via a network connection and start making a back up. Time Machine will create its sparse image, hopefully with a maximum size of the space that was available.
3) For speed, if you can connect directly to the volume, stop the backup and connect directly via USB/Firewire and complete the initial backup faster that way. (You need to select the backup disk again.)
4) Delete the filler to release the space you want to use for other things.
I haven't followed this exactly myself, but I am pretty sure it will work.

Answer 1

Sorry about my loose terminology - yes I did mean a sparse bundle. Yes if the backup is created on a local disk, it uses ordinary folders. If it is first created over a network, then it creates a sparse bundle. having created the sparse bundle, you can then connect the disk directly for speeding up the initial backup or a major restore, but also connect remotely for routine incremental backups or minor restores.
It sounds like the type of sparse bundle created may depend on circumstances. In my case I am backing up from a laptop onto a partition on my desktop machine running Leopard 10.5.2 and when I grew the partition, although the Time Machine preference pane saw the extra space, when it came to a backup I got an error message saying there was not enough space and reporting the original size. Deleting and starting over again fixed this.
It is possible that in other circumstances a disk attached to a Time Capsule or elsewhere might get a sparse bundle with different parameters.
Incidentally, I tried copying my old backup sparse bundle onto another drive, deleting it and letting Time Machine create a new sparse bundle on my grown partition and copying the contents from the old one into the new one. Time Machine refused to work with it, so I lost my old backups.
What we need is a Time Machine Utility to manipulate these files, copy them, move backups from direct folders to sparse bundles etc. Ideally Apple would produce this, but I would be willing to pay a shareware fee for that.