Time Machine on Ubuntu

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NWI

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Google tells me its possible to set up Time Machine on Ubuntu so it must be true:)

but seriously I am having no luck with this.
Have a HTPC running Ubuntu - 3 Internal HDD's. 2 of which are for media so formatted EXT3 and shared via Samba. The Mac can see these drives no problem both read and write. I then formatted the new 3rd Drive hfs+ in the hope of using it for auto Time Machine back ups.

Cannot see this drive from Mac and not even on the Ubuntu machine - can see it in GParted with the mounting point I created and used.

Very new to Ubuntu so looking for someone who can help me along here please.
 
NWI said:
I then formatted the new 3rd Drive hfs+ in the hope of using it for auto Time Machine back ups.
Click to expand...

Why would you do that, why not use ext3/4?

The mac does not care about the fs used on the server. Ubuntu also requires hfsprogs/hfspluse in order to access hfs+ volumes if not mistaken.
 
NWI said:
Google tells me its possible to set up Time Machine on Ubuntu so it must be true:)

but seriously I am having no luck with this.
Have a HTPC running Ubuntu - 3 Internal HDD's. 2 of which are for media so formatted EXT3 and shared via Samba. The Mac can see these drives no problem both read and write. I then formatted the new 3rd Drive hfs+ in the hope of using it for auto Time Machine back ups.

Cannot see this drive from Mac and not even on the Ubuntu machine - can see it in GParted with the mounting point I created and used.

Very new to Ubuntu so looking for someone who can help me along here please.
Click to expand...
As ponder wrote, the 3rd drive does not need to be hfs+, the Macs won't see which filesystem is used on the server.
They do care about which network protocol is used though. As far as I know, timemachine doesn't work over SMB, only AFP.
You'll need to install and configure netatalk to provider AFP shares.

Bear in mind the version of netatalk in Debian and Ubuntu is very old and it might cause trouble with recent versions of OS X.

I have set up several time machines using NAS4Free and it works well. I even have separate time machines running off one server for multiple users.
 
You need to set up an AFP server for time machine. I don't remember which article I used back in the day, but this one looks familiar:

https://kremalicious.com/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/

I did have problems with the image getting corrupted once ina while, but I never had the time or inclination to work out why that happen - might have been unrelated.
 
thanks all for replies.
the only reason I used HFS+ as in an article I read it stated that Time Machine would only work with this format. I will try reformat EXT4 and see if that helps.
I have installed netatalk and set it up to allow the AFP share.
created mount point and mounted all 3 partitions of the 3Tb drive to this point. Then set up this mount point as the AFP share.

I used that exact link (Kremalicious) to set up along with one or two others to try and get consistent information.
Again I am a Windows person so small amount of self taught Ubuntu knowledge when I set up the HTPC and even less on Mac - wife uses it for her Design business. Goal here is to fully automate her backups to this Ubuntu server.

Will go through all those links and see if it gets me further
 
NWI said:
the only reason I used HFS+ as in an article I read it stated that Time Machine would only work with this format.
Click to expand...

The reason we need to use ext4 (or some other Linux filesystem) is that it's Liniux that will be writing to the disk - Time Machine will only be writing to the share while Linux translates from the share to the disk. The last part of the article I posted shows you how to create a sparse-image, whic his what Time Machine will mount, format HFS+ and write to.

To ginggs' point, yes, that's an old article - I think I used it five years ago. Some of the steps - like compiling packages - may not be necessary. Just apt-get install them first and see if that works.

If this doesn't end up working, there are other ways to do this. arq can backup to a local network computer via scp (so Linux box is perfect) in addition to be able to backup to Amazon Glacier ($10 per TB per month).
 
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