Using your debian NAS for timemachine backups

With the recent rebuild of my NAS finished I finally decided to tackle how to properly backup my MacOS machines.

All you need is a linux server and a recentish version of samba.
The configuration for the network share should look like the code snippet below. All you should need to change is the path.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
[Timemachine]
    comment = Time Machine
    path = /data/files/timemachine
    browseable = yes
    writeable = yes
    create mask = 0600
    directory mask = 0700
    spotlight = yes
    vfs objects = catia fruit streams_xattr
    fruit:aapl = yes
    fruit:time machine = yes
    fruit:resource = xattr

Now you just need to restart samba.

In case your Mac does not automagically find the share you can manually set the timemachine destination with the following command

1
tmutil setdestination 'smb://user:password@server/timemachine'

Now you should have Timemachine working away on your mac!