Time Machine for OSX Lion 10.7 using Debian 6.0 Squeeze

http://www.mikepalmer.net/build-a-netatalk-time-machine-for-osx-lion-using-debian-6-0-squeeze/

by danielwozniak • 15 years ago

52 26 15 years ago

mikepalmer.net

Build your own time machine using open-source software.

aeontech• 15 years ago

is there a mirror?

danielwozniak• 15 years ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S1ltAY9...

jws• 15 years ago

Can't see site, but it all "just works" if you can go to wheezy on your debian machine.

g0atbutt• 15 years ago

It appears to be down. Here's the Google Cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a7H_n-e...

Thrymr• 15 years ago

An older page on doing this with a lot more detail:

http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-serve...

Not all of it is necessary anymore with Lion (and maybe with more recent Debian/Ubuntu, I'm not sure), but it is a nice overview of the pieces.

smackfu• 15 years ago

To be honest, I'd probably just get a refurb 2 GB Time Capsule for $260, considering the bare drive would run you $160.

latchkey4• 15 years ago

One addition, use my little automator action (Create Backup Volume) [1] to generate the sparsebundle for each machine you are backing up. It sets up the sparsebundle with better arguments, namely a larger sparse-band-size=131072 which greatly improves the speed of the backups since it is fewer files being opened in the sparsebundle.

Don't worry about the size you give the bundle since newer versions of osx will just resize the bundle to the size of the shared volume in netatalk (something which was neglected in the blog authors post).

[1] http://code.google.com/p/backmyfruitup/downloads/list

hmottestad• 15 years ago

Here is another alternative.

Get a second-hand mac mini and attach an external hdd. Then share the hdd on the network and use it from timemachine.Now you also have a normal web server with apache and php, install your favorite db and you're done.

Or you can create a hackintosh from an old laptop. Though this is potentially quite unstable.

jonhendry• 15 years ago

And that way you could use a RAID configuration of your choice, rather than being limited to what Apple provides in Time Capsules, which I don't think are even RAID.

wmf• 15 years ago

Getting a little off the topic, I find it interesting that so many people RAID their backups but not their primary storage.

pilif• 15 years ago

While I appreciate the fun of getting this to work, overall, I really wonder whether saving $300 for a Time Capsule is worth it if it means that your backup solution is now relying on you typing a command like

    defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

The "unsupported" would give me pause when setting up a solution I will need to be there when the worst happens. There must be a reason for this preference to be there.

Granted, it could just be Apple wanting to sell their products and thus doing some public key magic for it to work without the switch. Or it could be that TM relies on some very rarely used feature in AFP which is not or at least not perfectly implemented in netatalk.

Are you willing to bet your backup on this flag being needed for the former reason and not the latter?

g_lined• 15 years ago

You're quite write that it should give you pause! I have, however, used this flag for 2 years now and it does work very well and have had no problems at all and that's over 2 versions of OS X.

My computer is an iMac and my server is an ubuntu server with a separate 2TB HDD in it for Timemachine.

Edited for spelling

lloeki• 15 years ago

> Or it could be that TM relies on some very rarely used feature in AFP which is not or at least not perfectly implemented in netatalk.

There was a Time Capsule firmware + OS X update duo that fixed reliability issues somewhere in the Snow Leopard timeline. IIRC it added a bunch of "damage control/prevention" methods to AFP and HFS+ (backups being stored in a remotely accessed sparsebundle), aiming to bulletproof against flaky network situations and interruptions like sleep.

Hopefully OS X appears to degrade nicely in absence of those features, although you might not get all the safety net features.

I built an Debian armel netatalk package myself for fun about one year ago. It took "quite a while" to compile on my NSLU2, but AFP shares ended up working like a charm.

latchkey4• 15 years ago

Apple put that in there so that they could sell more TC's. They also seem to make backwards incompatibile changes to the protocol for every OS release.

That said, the netatalk (and other vendors such as Drobo) have been pretty good at staying on top of the changes. You can safely ignore this as an issue.

wooster2• 15 years ago

> Apple put that in there so that they could sell more TC's.

Not only is that pure speculation on your part, it's also not true.

saurik• 15 years ago

Agree. As well, a lot of the people who report on things like this "jump the gun" by seeing a few successful runs where it "worked for a while", and then don't realize the consequences.

Example: Time Machine uses a special file format called a "sparse bundle" that requires special HFS+ filesystem support. When the backup drive runs out of disk space, it starts removing "bands" from the bundle to free up disk space.

However, it at least used to be the case that this did not work on remote network volumes due to differences in the file sharing protocol or filesystem, and the result was that it would just sit there deleting bands over and over again until you had no more backup.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1221879?start=0&tst...

Check out that post, and scroll down to where it says: """Everything went fine until today, where finally the disk filled up... and I got this in the console""", and the epic journey of discovering he no longer has any backups.

This specific issue may be fixed. There was a comment made by someone later in the thread that this behavior was changed somewhat in Leopard in a way that made this specific issue no longer be the problem.

http://blog.cohen-rose.org/2008/04/time-machine-update-fixes...

However, do you really know yet? No. Do I honestly trust these people to have looked into the issue well enough to know what else might burn me? No. Could they demonstrate this trust? Actually: yes.

What I'd want to hear that they reverse engineered Time Machine sufficiently to determine how the check was implemented, and then went through the logic of the storage system to determine how it was storing things, proving to themselves that this specific alternative setup provided that, despite the check.

However, what we see here is just yet another article telling us nothing newer than we knew in 2007/8: that there is a setting you can turn off to allow Time Machine to store to drives it otherwise believes are unsupported... nothing new to see here.

gsiener• 15 years ago

Well, to be fair, I've been dealing with a fubar'd system since Monday that is all Apple -- macbook air, time capsule for backup, full disk encryption w/ Lion. Apparently there's a huge bug that prevents the PGP key from properly mounting the drive on reboot (as of 10.7.2). Restoring from time machine AND doing a fresh lion install have both failed, so I'm not convinced the "Supported" flag helps much :/

drewr• 15 years ago

Another data point. If you already have a regular Airport Extreme, you can plug a drive into the USB port, share it, and set it as your Time Machine target. I didn't see the need to spend the extra money for the Time Capsule.

0x0• 15 years ago

I had this running (except with netatalk 2.2.x I don't think all that "unsupported" prefs setting and xml hacking was necessary), anyway after a month or so Mac OS started complaining that the backup couldn't be "verified" or somesuch, and then proceeded to re-do the whole backup. As this started happening every couple of days I gave up and switched to running rdiff-backup manually across ssh instead. Makes browsing the backup repository much easier too, especially if I only need something from the last run.

mkhpalm• 15 years ago

I think you're right about netatalk 2.2 avahi stuff.

latchkey4• 15 years ago

I use Backblaze (http://goo.gl/LKYIq) in case my house burns down and I do TM backups to a DroboShare FS in case I need the data immediately. The TM backups are also full backups so that if I need to just restore a whole machine I have that option too. I also have PreyProject installed in case someone steals my laptop.

Having lost data in the past, I can only say that setting up some sort of backup/recovery system is very important. Hard disks and SSD's are like life, they have a 100% guaranteed failure rate. =)

mikehoward• 15 years ago

Plug a 1T LaCie all terrain HD into the FW 800 port. Works a lot faster than the wireless and it's easy to back up the backup (portably)

fpgeek• 15 years ago

I found the title a bit unclear. The first time I read it, it sounded like Apple was using Debian Squeeze as part of Time Machine somehow, rather than someone interfacing to Time Machine using squeeze. Both stories would have been interesting, I just wanted to know which one to expect.

Time Machine for OSX Lion 10.7 using Debian 6.0 Squeeze

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