Can someone tell me how to reliably backup over a network using TimeMachine, without a TimeCapsule?
Solution 1:
Here's an article I've stumbled upon that describes how to configure an Ubuntu box to be recognized as something to use with Time Machine by OSX. I've meant to hack this together on my Gentoo, but never got around to do, so I'm not making guarantees of whether it works or not.
http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/
In short, it's a 6-step guide on making OSX think that your Ubuntu computer is a XServe box, because it will be able to talk AFP and Bonjour.
- Modify and install Netatalk (Open Source AFP implementation)
- Configure Netatalk
- Configure shared volumes (and Time Machine volume)
- Install Avahi (Open Source Bonjour implementation)
- Configure Avahi and advertise services
- Configure TimeMachine
Solution 2:
The transport doesn't matter (I do it over AFP to an airport extreme and SMB to a FreeBSD box (onto a raidz volume).
The key is enabling backups to unsupported volumes:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
This will make a mounted share available and create a sparse disk image atop it and allow you to back up to that.
Solution 3:
I have had success with this, but not using AFP. With OSX macs, you're much better off using Samba and mounting the shares that way. I've been using that for quite a while with no ill effects.
Solution 4:
jwz published a good article on the subject:
The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it.
Solution 5:
The two links above cover the prevailing issues with TimeMachine/AFP and remote clients. If you Google the various subject topics, there seems to be an increasing number of issues with AFP servers (running under netatalk) having issues with TimeMachine. I'm unaware of technical specifics, but I recently read that 10.5.7 did nothing to decrease these issues. When I first ran netatalk, 2.0.3 (with some patches), was the latest package. I experienced a wide range of issues with a small lan of Leopard (various patch level) machines, all running into various issues you can find sprinkled around on the netatalk-devel list. All of it is going into the 2.0.4 release that is not out yet, so you should check the trunk builds out. I had no problem compiling these on both an arm/i386 debian setup with the basic libraries to service Leopard clients.
I am unsure of this, but I recall someone asking about just moving the shares over to NFS/Samba, since it would offer the same service but not show up in the Finder browser (they disabled this in 10.5) and it is because TimeMachine uses a sparsebundle (form of dmg)/storage format that is specific to HFS+ and features like resource forks. They mentioned an instance where a TimeMachine restore was attempted on this setup and while it looked complete and TM reported no errors, the backup was fatally corrupt.
Basics for options: - use a separate system that backsup using a db format not specific to osx (many use sqlite or bdb). There are at least ten good programs on OSX you can find for this. - compile the latest trunk and test. I've yet to have any issues.