Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS

Updated to Mac OS X 10.5.6 last night. When Time Machine started, it took a looooooong time in the "Preparing for the backup" state. I thought I lost my TM sparsebundle access again and almost cancelled the backup. However, I decided to let it do its thing. It was at least 30-45 minutes before Time Machine started showing progress in actually backing up. The backup size was 1.5 GB right after the upgrade to 10.5.6. So, the good news is that the update to 10.5.6 did not break the sparsebundle on the ReadyNAS.

I had downloaded the 10.5.6 updatefrom the Apple web site -- I used the 668 MB Combo Update instead of letting the Software Update uitility pull the update from Apple automatically. Last night a lot of people posted problems with updating to 10.5.6 via the Software Update utility, but downloading the Combo update from the Apple web site seemed to have worked flawlessly for most everyone. Also, if you have more than one Mac in the household, you can download the Combo update to a ReadyNAS share and launch it from there. I did exactly that from two of my Macs (aluminum Macbook and 1st-generation Macbook Air), and it worked fine. However, I did not do this in parallel, so I would suggest doing this on one Mac at a time.