Running 10.6.3 Snow Leopard backing up to a Linkstation Live 1.0 TB Time Machine share using the manual sparsebundle creation instructions from Leopard days. This has always been a bit iffy as far as the share dropping off the network and requireing a Mac reboot. So not sure if the Mac or the Buffalo are to blame. Anyway since going to 10.6.3 I noticed the following in system.log.
Apr 3 18:21:57 vos-mac com.apple.backupd[20052]: Warning: Destination /Volumes/Machine does not support TM Lock Stealing
Apr 3 18:21:57 vos-mac com.apple.backupd[20052]: Warning: Destination /Volumes/Machine does not support Server Reply Cache
Despite these errors the backups seem to actually complete more reliably than they have in the past. I'm wondering though what to make of the errors? And also wondering if Buffalo has any patches in the works as it seems Apple has made changes to TM in Snow Leopard. Here is an example of a change that seems to have been made but I have not added or looked for this plist file...Insanely Mac TM setup
It seems after some research these errors are due to features missing from the version of netatalk used by Buffalo. So the question remains, what they will do about it? Their competitors have updates in development with a newer netalk version that supports these features.
What is the model number of the unit? There are two revisons of the LS-Live. Also which version of firmware. It looks like it could be caused by the version of AFP used on your LinkStation being a little too old to support some of the newer time machine features added in 10.6.0. I cannot say for sure but we are looking into it.
The folks over at Data Robotics have a KB article...
Will Time Machine work with my Drobo FS in OS X 10.6.3?
Apple introduced changes in Mac OS 10.6.3 that reset the maximum size of sparse images to the size of the volume. This behavior is undesirable when used with storage devices such as Drobo storage arrays that support thin provisioning, as the reported volume size often exceeds the physical storage space available. Data Robotics is aware of the issue and is working on software changes to ensure compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6.3 and higher. Until a fix is released, we do not support Time Machine on Drobo FS.
I presume it affects all NAS vendors supporting Time Machine.