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I’ve been having problems getting Time Machine to reliably back up to a 750 GB disk attached to my AirPort Extreme. Things will work great for a while, but then the backups will just start failing as if the .sparsebundle has become corrupt. This seems to happen if I sleep my machine while Time Machine is backing things up, wake it briefly, then sleep it again before TM completes. On the next backup things will simply fail and never work again.
This wouldn’t be so bad, except that since 10.5.5 or so this speedup for the initial Time Machine backup doesn’t seem to work any more. It’s almost as if Apple removed (or broke?) .sparsebundle TM support locally.
I decided that the best fix would be to sidestep the problem and just start doing Time Machine backups locally, but I’m out of disk slots in my Mac Pro. Wanting this done quickly (and as cheaply as possible) I ran over to Micro Center†, picked up a plate for the back of the computer which adapts two internal SATA to eSATA ($7.99) and a cheap eSATA disk enclosure ($26.99). The adapter cables were fit to the ODD SATA ports in the Mac Pro, which are two unused SATA ports on the board apparently reserved for optical drive use.
Not having right angle connectors made this a tight fit, but everything set nicely in place once the connectors were seated. The plate was mounted in the unused second video card slot, 750GB disk (from the AirPort) fitted in the enclosure, and everything setup on a shiny new partition. Time Machine is now doing its thing, about 10% done in one hour, and hopefully it’ll all continue working.
† I do not like this store, but it’s the only reasonably priced local computer parts shop. The whole building, customers, and staff all feel as sleezey as what one would find at Gibralter Trade Center. Sales staff that can regularly be overheard selling products based on the wrong information, commission sales, and returned / defective products sold as ‘refurbished’. Think Fry’s with a layer of skin oil on it, like an old keyboard.