Re: Time machine backups

On 08/01/2025 12:47, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-01-08 03:49, 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?

  You can not backup using any type of file copy, like rsync, a Linux filesystem into samba, or a windows filesystem.
 The only way to do it is using archives like tar.
 

If I understand what you meant by that, I would agree.
SAMBA is not a suitable way to back anything up at all. Except at a trivial level of data files
You need to use a linux file system and rsync either with rsyncd or direct copy to an NFS system
--
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
– H. L. Mencken, American journalist, 1880-1956