Re: Time machine backups

On Wed, 8 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2025-01-07, vallor <vallor@cultnix.org> wrote:

Bought a 4TB external USB/NVME device for my workstation.
Installed Samba and configured it to use the "fruit"
module to offer up a Time Machine share for the
Mac Studio. (Also using it with Timeshift on the
workstation itself, but that part was easier.)
>
(Backups are good; automated versioned backups are better.)

>
I have setup "time machine" backups on two of my servers, using rsync to
a local external drive, but I have not figured out how to do it to a
Samba share. On the local external drive, using ext4 file system, hard
links make it very space efficient, but I don't think you can do that
with a Samba mounted remote drive. Any hints? Do you run the rsync on
the file server, so that you can do the hard links on the backup drive's
ext4 file system while the backup server sees its production client as
the remote Samba mount?
>
And is there a way to use a cheap remote "storage box" that is only
accessible as a Samba NAS as the versioned storage medium with
similarly good storage efficiency?
>

My current backup system is rsync over ssh and tor. I've used it successfully between two countries about 800 km apart. Come to think of it, even longer.
I also use hardlinks to save space, and I run a 60 day sliding window on the server to keep the last 60 days of backups. It works great.
During the christmas holidays I've checked out restic. I am very happy about the result and I'm thinking about retiring my own home cooked backup script I've used for 10-15 years in favour of restic.
What I like about it is that:
1. It's a simple go executable, I just drop in on the linux system and off you go. All batteries included.
2. Works over sftp, so I don't need anything on the server.
3. Has built in deduplication and like rsync, transmits only unique data. I do a full backup when visiting my backup server, and then do differentials when travelling and works beautifully.
If you are curious, here's the link: https://restic.readthedocs.io/ .
Oh, and in terms of NAS and smb, I use an old laptop as the backup server, and I mount my NAS (2 x 4 TB disks) in fstab at boot. When I backup, I I have my backup repository under /mnt/NAS/backup, so the data travels over sftp to the backup server, and then rests peacefully on my smb mount.