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My university uses Google Apps. With Google recently unveiling higher education customers will receive unlimited drive space, I want to take advantage of this to automatically backup my Mac. The general idea is as follows:

  • Using Google Drive client, create a synced folder in your home directory.
  • Mount the a folder in the Google Drive as a volume using a symbolic link in the /Volumes/ directory.
  • Convince Time Machine that this volume is really suitable to use as a backup disk so it will place the sparsebundles in the “volume” (i.e. the linked Google Drive folder).
  • Google Drive client will automatically sync and backup the sparse bundles.

However, I am stuck on points 2 and 3. I created a symbolic link /Volumes/Timemachine -> ~/Google Drive/Timemachine/ but finder does not recognize the link as a legitimate drive (even though this is the same technique used to map the macintosh hard drive to root in the /Volumes/ folder).

Has anyone ever done this before? Does anyone have any suggestions to proceed further?

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Time Machine needs a partition formatted as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) to be happy and do its job.

I'm not sure if there's a good way to convince Time Machine that a folder is such a partition without some trickery. Furthermore, Time Machine utilizes a drive completely, it assumes the entire volume is dedicated to itself.

This guide uses a sparse bundle to keep Time Machine from exceeding a certain usage on a network Volume - it may be applicable to your situation:

http://code.stephenmorley.org/articles/time-machine-on-a-network-drive/

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