Time Machine Backups on a networked Volume

Recently I bought a new 2TB external Hard Drive for my Media Server, which is a Mac Mini unit and while it is a good drive to store media content I wanted to do more with it. I figured I'd put it to good use by making it also a Time Machine Backup Drive and I wanted it a networked one. While it is an easy task to complete locally, I quickly found out that for a networked Time Machine backup solution, last were written when OS Tiger was King, but I'll be using OS Lion (10.7.3).

First, I have to say that there is an official way to do this, which utilizes Mac Os Lion Server with a Time Machine Server enabled but to do this Apple way, one needs a lot of time and knowledge.

Now back to the point.

First we need to prepare a local Time Machine backup partition.

Attention!! You need to know what you're doing since I'm only covering it in general! - I'm not rensponsible for any loss of data due to misuse of Disk Utility!

1. Open Disk Utility
2. Select your drive (best if it was a GUID partitioned disk but it seems an MBR schema is ok, since you only need na HFS+ partition to do it)
3. Shrink your existing partition leaving enough space for backups (I used something about 500GB since I'll be using it for two Macs, about 200GB total)
4. Add a new Partition, name it and set its size to whatever you desire.

Your new disk should look somewhat like this:

  

Ok. We're done partitioning. Open System Preferences, go to Time Machine and set your new partition as time machine backup disk.

Now share your Volume with AFP:

1. Go back to System Preferences and open Sharing
2. Enable File Sharing
3. Go to File Sharing
4. In Options enable AFP
5. Add your partition as a new share and leave privileges at default, like this:

Ok, we're done here. Back to my MacBook Air.

(Optional) in Terminal type: "sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1"

1. Open Finder and connect to your "server" via AFP
2. Mount your Backup partition by entering it
3. Open System Preferences Time Machine Backup pane and turn on Time Machine
4. You should be presented with the following:
5. Use It!

Viola!