Re: Time machine backups

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.)

On Wed, 8 Jan 2025 02:49:11 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote in
 <slrnvnrpt7.2oheu.lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com>:

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?

On 2025-01-08, vallor <vallor@cultnix.org> wrote:

I'm not doing anything on the backend except provide the
Samba share.  MacOS Time Machine has it's own format
for storing versioned data, which is fairly opaque when
looking at the files on the backend filesystem.

Yes, I know Time Machine.

I'm also using Timeshift (not Time Machine) on my Linux
workstation, which backs up directly to the ext4 filesystem
on the external drive with rsync.  I'm pretty sure that uses
hard links to be space-efficient.  (It would be even better
and faster if it hard-linked directories, but that's not a
BCP for Unix.)

Yes, that seems to be exactly what I did with a cronjob running rsync.
I like it, and would like to put the backup drive off-site once I get a
faster network connection (gigabit fiber) activated in a week or two.
But I don't know enough about how to set it up.