I have been running Time Machine backups as described in my tutorial for more than a week.
In the Apple forums there have been discussions that the above method does not work. However:
- Backups via Time Machine to a NAS DO work. It will not work properly if you do not backup inside of a sparsebundle.
- A bug (which got fixed in OSX 10.5.4) prevented Time Machine not to purge old backups and resize the sparsebundle. This is now working properly and I could confirm it in the OS X console.
- When a sparsebundle is created with fixed size and a quota is applied on your NAS, Time Machine will purge old backups to make the latest backup fit within the provided quota
- OS X introduced additional AFP functions 4C (for Spotlight), 4E (directory sync for TimeMachine) and 4F (file sync for TimeMachine) and the NetTalk protocol implemented on any NAS does not support this. The lack of those functions however does not affect your backups.