4

I'm using my main office server as a "poor man's Time Capsule" with Time Machine to back up my Mac OS X boxes. It works fine but I've just built a nicer/faster/bigger server so I wanted to extend the volume that my iMac is backing up onto.

With Disk Utility, you can easily grow the sparsebundle that is providing the underlying disk image, but so far I don't seem to be able to grow the size of the Volume that is stored on said sparse bundle. For the record, the file system used is HFS+J.

Is there a way to grow the volume or am I basically stuck with recreating the Sparse Bundle and starting anew?

To clarify: I've got one sparsebundle that the iMac is backing up to via Time Machine. The sparsebundle resides on a Samba server that my Macs recognise as a backup volume via the usual well publicised hack. This sparsebundle used to be 139GB in size and I've extended the size of the bundle/image to 270GB using Disk Utility. So far, so good.

However, when I mount the image, I get the volume contained therein, which is still showing its original size of 139GB. Now it looks like Disk Utility should have been able to extend both the size of the sparsebundle and the volume stored therein, but I haven't had any success in that.

kinokijuf
  • 8,364
Timo Geusch
  • 500

3 Answers3

2

I researched this topic myself some time ago and I didn't find any solution.

One article mentioned that there were "very few programs" that can do it, without supplying any information about the mentioned programs.

Gnu parted can resize HFS+, but it can only shrink not grow. I also tried to find out if Partition Magic can grow HFS+. There is no information about that on their website. I didn't find out a support email address, they seem to only offer paid telephone support.

From all this I think there is no software that can grow HFS+.

Ludwig Weinzierl
  • 8,083
2
  1. Drag the disk file onto disk utility.
  2. Select the proper disk image file in the sidebar.
  3. Click the 'Resize Image' button on the toolbar.
  4. Click on the blue/grey disclosure triangle to expose the additional settings.
  5. Click on the radio button that says 'Resize Partition Only'
  6. Drag the slider all of the way to the right.

This works for the test image i created

GameFreak
  • 194
0

Disk Utility can resize most partitions just fine. You can also use diskutil resizeVolume from the command line (Terminal.app).

Ask Bjørn Hansen
  • 471