Advertised heavily and presented enticingly, every Macintosh user has heard that Time Machine takes the complexity out of backups. While that may be true for individual users, managing numerous backups over a network is still a significant challenge for most Macintosh administrators. So with all the attention paid to the Time Machine in Leopard client, there hasn’t been much focus on how Leopard Server can be used to back up multiple users to remote disks. In fact, if you’re not looking closely, the Time Machine features in OS X Server are easy to miss entirely.

To configure your workstations to use server-based Time Machine storage, you’ll have to set up network shares. If you aren’t running AFP, your first step is to turn on file sharing. Open Server Admin and select your server from the left. Click “Settings” from the toolbar, then “Services” below it, and check “AFP” from the list of services and save.

Now choose “File Sharing”, then the “Volumes” view below it, and browse to the location you’re assigning as your Time Machine share. Set the permissions as “Read & Write” to the group you’re backing up (for a small workgroup, that could be all your users, while for larger organizations you’ll likely want to split users up across a number of shares). Click the “Share” button in the upper right, and save again. With your share created, switch to the “Share Points” view, and select “Enable as Time Machine backup destination”, saving one last time.

Using Bonjour, Leopard Server will broadcast the share across your local network, making it available as a Time Machine disk automatically in each machine’s System Preferences. Once the user is logged in to the share, the use of a network volume is transparent to the user. On the management side, each backup is created as an individual sparse disk image, allowing portability and preventing user files from getting intermingled. Since users can delete files from these images, it’s wise to back them up off the server to removable media as well.

While it isn’t the answer for every environment, setting up Time Machine through OS X Server combines many of the best features of local and remote backup methods.