19 ms·

ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

254 points by picture 3y ago

beering 3y ago
Is netatalk the key thing here that makes it Time Machine compatible? The rest seems like standard DIY home server stuff.
- jamesy0ung 3y ago
  Yes, although Apple is deprecating AFP and now allows backup over SMB
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    A shame they still haven’t implemented the ability to target iCloud.
- tverbeure 3y ago
  Yes. There is nothing special about this, other than personally finding out that I could replace my failing Time Capsule for something so cheap.
- housemusicfan 3y ago
  Yeah this is as pointless as every "life hack" on YouTube. Haven't you been able to Time Machine backup to any HFS-formatted sparse bundle since forever? Located on literally ANY samba server - Windows, Linux, or ye olde NAS. I have personally done this for years. I don't get the novelty here unless you're into the "I built a submarine with parts I got off eBay" angle.
  - tverbeure 3y ago
    I write these blog posts for primarily for myself, and hopefully because somebody might find them useful. I claim no novelty, there are no ads, no traffic tracking, there is no intention whatsoever to make money from it. But if my posts irritate some jerk on the Internet who has nothing better to do than spread negativity, then that’s definitely a nice unintended benefit. Do you need a hug?
    - rodgerd 3y ago
      > But if my posts irritate some jerk on the Internet who has nothing better to do than spread negativity, then that’s definitely a nice unintended benefit. Amen.
      - housemusicfan 3y ago
        > Amen. Inability to process criticism is how this industry gave us things like the Juicero.
        tverbeure 3y ago
        When you see small time Sunday blogger pushing back against toxic negativity, your immediate reaction is “this is what got us Juicero”? Amazing. Ironically, the one thing Juicero got right is cutting their losses early and calling it a day.
    - housemusicfan 3y ago
      No malice intended, but I genuinely felt as if you had wasted your own time. Sorry if I don't subscribe to the usual HN tug-fest. If you learned something - good for you but I've been down this exact road many times before. Oftentimes I have to mentor younger engineers that there is often a much simpler solution if you can see the forest for the trees.
      - rfrey 3y ago
        So many asses out there excusing their self indulgent rude behaviour as "telling it like it is".
        lostlogin 3y ago
        Season five (I think) of Silicon Valley covers ‘radical candor’ it’s very painful and is a bit like this.
  - Forgeties79 3y ago
    We see projects like this almost daily on HN. Sometimes people just like to tinker and share, so yeah, the “I built a submarine with parts I got off eBay” type work can be fun and even useful. You never know who you might help! If that irritates you, this might not be the site for you.
- satysin 3y ago
  AppleTalk is deprecated by Apple for a few years now. You should really be using SMB for Time Machine.
- alwillis 3y ago
  > Is netatalk the key thing here that makes it Time Machine compatible? The rest seems like standard DIY home server stuff. The last update to AFP shipped with Mac OS X Mountain Lion in 2012 [1]. Nobody should be using AFP in 2023, unless you have no other choice. While you can use Time Machine to backup to an SMB share, ideally you want to use an APFS volume to get all of the benefits, especially if you're concerned about data integrity. You can read about using APFS network shares for Time Machine at The Eclectic Light Company [2], a Mac-focused blog/website by Howard Oakley. If you're interested in the details of how Time Machine works, nobody I'm aware of has written more about its details than he has [3]. He's written a slew of useful macOS utilities, including T2M2 for Time Machine [4]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol [2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/04/16/time-machine-to-apfs-using-a-network-share/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/04/16/time-machine-to-apfs-usi... [3]: https://eclecticlight.co/?s=time+machine https://eclecticlight.co/?s=time+machine [4]: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/09/29/going-beyond-t2m2-with-mints-grokking-time-machine-to-apfs/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/09/29/going-beyond-t2m2-with-m...
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    Time Machine created an APFS sparse bundle on the SMB share. How is an APFS sparse bundle on an APFS volume better than an APFS sparse bundle on another volume?
mberning 3y ago
Synology has nice support for time machine backups. Very easy to set up in DSM.
- murphyslaw 3y ago
  Yh, and even they can't get it right. You lose connectivity once in a while and the only way to recover is to erase the backup and start over. I came here to see if someone had built a macos native time machine, but this looks like just another hack.
  - climb_stealth 3y ago
    Just posted this in another comment as well. Ditch Time Machine altogether. Use Carbon Copy Cloner instead. It backs up straight to a network drive. Been using it with my Synology for years. Using Time Machine is playing russian roulette with backup data.
    - krackers 3y ago
      In the pre-APFS days, there was one difference in that using time machine would give you snapshots whereas CCC would only be a "dest like source" backup (safetynet would preserve deleted files, but not version modified ones). You could work around this with ZFS snapshots on the destination, but since it's not natively supported it's all a bit clunky. With APFS you get snapshots too, so the only real difference is the UI for restoring a snapshot. I do wish Apple would allow 3rd party applications to populate "versions", so the inbuilt UI could be used with other apps. It could even fit with their existing Finder extensions: it could bring together different versions of a file on cloud providers, local backups, etc., and present them in a unified UI.
- pridkett 3y ago
  A superpower of doing Time Machine backups to a Synology is that you can put it on a BTRFS drive with automatic snapshotting. About once a year something seems to happen that causes Time Machine to give a “whoopsie, gotta start over from the beginning again!” sort of error. I’ve found that going back a day or two with snapshots on BTRFS fixes the problem.
scorxn 3y ago
I have a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole and Time Machine, making that little board probably the best value piece of tech I've ever owned. https://saschaeggi.medium.com/use-a-raspberry-pi-4-for-time-machine-works-with-big-sur-1e66a9650789 https://saschaeggi.medium.com/use-a-raspberry-pi-4-for-time-... is what I followed.
- satysin 3y ago
  I use a Synology now but I used a Pi for a couple of years before that without issue. I did give it to my daughter to use at university but I very much doubt she actually used it and I've not thought about asking until this post :^)
- tverbeure 3y ago
  RPis are great hobby electronics projects, but IMO they don’t have any benefit for this kind of use over a thin client? They’re more expensive, you need an extra RPi enclosure and power supply, you can’t use M.2 SSD sticks without an additional USB3 enclosure, they have a history of corrupting flash cards, and their idle power is only a little bit lower.
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    Can confirm about MicroSD flash cards, they're too unreliable for stuff that must be on 24/7, and get corrupt easily. Good for tinkering projects and media players, not for critical stuff where the downtime needed to pull the card and fsck/reinstall it might not be an option.
    - zikduruqe 3y ago
      I've been running a weather website on a RPi2 since 2014. And it's on the same SD card. MicroSD cards don't get corrupted as much as the interwebz says they do.
      - tverbeure 3y ago
        It has probably to do with the number of unmanaged power cycles. A hobby electronics project will see many of those. A weather station may only see them when the power in the neighbor goes down.
climb_stealth 3y ago
My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be no support and the forums are not going to help. The broken backup is not going to be able to be repaired. Time Machine uses the "fuck you user" approach of not providing any information about what it does, or doesn't, or intends to do or whatever. If your data is worth backing up, don't use Time Machine. [0] https://bombich.com https://bombich.com
- firecall 3y ago
  My advice is to use TimeMachine plus other backups. I use: 1. TimeMachine on a 20TB TrueNAS ZFS setup 2. BackBlaze 3. ...not a versioned backup, but iCloud Synching, which is a useful disaster recovery.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Brajeshwar 3y ago
    I've found that the ideal size of Timemachine drive is just about twice of the target drive. It last for months if not years -- enough to go back. Beyond that, there must be an archival/backup system in place if you still want to get back files deleted years ago.
    - wlesieutre 3y ago
      In my experience there's no need to worry about long term disk usage of Time Machine. The backup is going to get in a bad state and start failing to add new backups, requiring you to wipe it and start over before the drive fills up.
      - hoorible 3y ago
firecall 3y ago
Running TrueNAS on an ex-lease Dell Micro 7060 with a bunch of USB 4TB drives, is currently the best Time Machine destination I've ever used; fast, reliable, always available.
- unix_fan 3y ago
  Do you have a ZFS pool on each drive?
  - firecall 3y ago
    I keep it simple. I'm not confident with ZFS terminology, but here goes: I have one TimeMachine Pool: Then a single RAIDZ1 with 5x 4TB external USB3 drives connected via a powered TP-Link hub. I'm aware this is suboptimal on a couple of fronts; • USB Drives • 5x drives in a RAIDZ1 • Standard RAM, not ECC But the drives are what I had, and the 7060 Micro was super cheap ex-lease. I grabbed cheap used 32GB RAM from a local forum connection. After seven months it's been super reliable, no issues. I run 2x 515GB mirrored USB-C Samsung SSD drives as a VM-Pool, which is where I store my Linux VMs. My Linux VMs run database backups, my Dashy Dashboard, a few Docker containers and general dev-ops experiments. The 7060 itself has 32GB RAM and boots from mirrored 256GB internal SSD/NVME drives. I should probably do a Blog post on the utility of Ex-Lease Dell Micros over going Raspberry Pi or similar. I'm a huge fan :-)
maxmalkav 3y ago
I opened the link mostly to see which thin client model the author chose, to discover it is a HP T520, a machine it happens I also own an unit. I cannot comment on TimeMachine, but regarding hardware + Linux, it has been a more stable server than equivalent RPi or Odroid SBCs while not consuming much more power and just having a bigger size.
chris37879 3y ago
I just checked the box in unsaid for “make this share a Time Machine volume”, and added the unsaid machine and my MacBook to tailscale, configured the disk over tailscale and now I have remote Time Machine anywhere I have internet. This appliance seems like a good ticket if you just want a time capsule replacement, though.
st3fan 3y ago
I’m not sure if AFP (via Netatalk) is really the right thing to use. I’m pretty sure that “native” Time Machine now prefera CIFS (Samba) over the network.
- mustache_kimono 3y ago
  > I’m not sure if AFP (via Netatalk) is really the right thing to use. For years, Netatalk was still the more dependable solution, despite the deprecation warnings. I've had very good luck re: my current set up (ZFS and Samba 4.15.13 on Ubuntu 22.04) but Netatalk I believe still works very well.
  - donatj 3y ago
    Agreed, I still generally have much better luck with Netatalk which is why I have kept using it all these years.
- hoherd 3y ago
  Correct. > If given the choice between SMB and AFP, use SMB to back up to your external backup disk. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/types-of-disks-you-can-use-with-time-machine-mh15139/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/types-of-disks-you-...
- tverbeure 3y ago
  Thanks! I've added a warning at the top of the blog post, and will revisit next weekend.
solarkraft 3y ago
Thin clients are great, I got a Fujitsu Futro. Bohdi Linux: Interesting choice. Personally I've tried to set up Samba as a Time Machine backend twice and with both setups the initial backup would just completely lock up after a while. I might try again with Netatalk, but thought AFP was deprecated.
- harry8 3y ago
  Time machine with netatalk, I use the technique described here: https://palvelimet.net/1116/ https://palvelimet.net/1116/ Took about 5 minutes, Works for me.
- tverbeure 3y ago
  Somebody on Twitter recommended the Futro as well, but they seem to be a European thing. There are none for sale on US eBay.
Jedd 3y ago
I note that $25 got the author 16GB of storage - another $70 was spent on boosting that to 2TB. For GNU/Linux users - but will obviously work just fine for Microsoft and Apple clients - a good combination is SyncThing on local + remote mini-server, with BorgBackup running on just the server side. SyncThing gives you near-instant synchronisation, and BorgBackup gives you periodic archives (at your periodicity & retention preferences). For isolation purposes, I went for a small-footprint VM for each family member, and instructed that anything they really care about needs to go into ~/work/ or ~/private/ to be looked after.
- puzzlingcaptcha 3y ago
  You can often get those for as little as $10 these days, I paid $25 in 2020. Interestingly the APU supports AES-NI and has a little crypto accelerator for SHA (unlike RPi which didn't splurge the extra dollar on Armv8 Cryptography Extensions). I'd recommend going for t620 over the t520 for double the cores at the same idle power draw (6.5W). If you are fine with just two cores Fujitsu Futro s520 is also great. https://heap.ovh/tag/thin-client.html https://heap.ovh/tag/thin-client.html
sandreas 3y ago
I don't trust Time Machine any more. Years ago I wrote some shell scripts that help me mostly automate my complete system setup (with brew and friends). From time to time, I wipe my entire system and restore it with these scripts. Sometimes I have to adjust them, but mostly, they work without changes. For my data backups, I use restic. Big advantage is, that I can read my backups even when I don't have a macOS system present (e.g. my only macOS system had a hardware issue and my Time Machine Backup was pretty much useless until I got a new one). I know, this solution is not for everybody, but Time Machine corrupted my backups more than 5 times now and it feels so slow compared to restic, that I don't even think about retrying it after a new macOS release any more - even if my solution is a bit more work to do.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  What destination(s) do you backup to with Restic? I've been thinking about giving it a try.
  - sandreas 3y ago
    My home nas and via zfs send the off site nas from my parents.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    Just start with an external usb drive. You can pickup 8tb for under $200. If you want to go the extra step, you can buy two or three and physically swap them every N weeks. Store the older one at a different location. Far less sophisticated than a real NAS, but also fewer moving pieces and things to go wrong.
  - mfashby 3y ago
    Local NAS and backblaze. It works well.
    - core-utility 3y ago
      If you're using Backblaze B2, check out Wasabi instead. I saved a good amount of money by moving.
tambourine_man 3y ago
$25 used
pcurve 3y ago
"Don’t worry, I also use BackBlaze for automated off-site backups. And all my projects are stored on GitHub and different PCs as well" That's smart. I've had 7 catastrophic drive failure in 20 years, 4 when I was using homegrown backup. Due to my being sloppy / lazy, I still managed to lose a lot of data in 2 of the instances. Homegrown backup solution isn't for me. :)
syntaxing 3y ago
Home storage is the only thing I don't do a DIY solution. I used to run a samba server with timemachine settings and pointed it to an external SSD. But now I just run a Synology NAS with a RAID configuration. Definitely more expensive than $25 but worth the peace of mind IMO.
andrewbutts 3y ago
After losing a decade of archived email from friends and family to a Time Machine failure, I never turned it on ever again. You had one job.
saagarjha 3y ago
Ok so like this seems to have been written today but I think it’s notable that the Mac they showed in the post is running a five year old version of macOS: I don’t actually think this is a good idea anymore, and I say this as someone who ran a Raspberry Pi in a similar configuration for a while. Today, if you’re using Time Machine, you should back up to an APFS volume with snapshots. They are far faster and more reliable than HFS+ disks. I get the feeling that macOS might at some point stop supporting new HFS+ backups altogether. So, I wouldn’t recommend making them anymore. Unfortunately, APFS drivers for Linux kinda sorta don’t exist. Not to the point where you’d want to rely on them for backups, anyways. So the move here is really to just get a Mac to handle this. My network has an old MacBook Pro (one of the last pre-Touch Bar ones) wired into the backbone for this. It’s pricey but believe me, this is the setup you want. (By the way, if you’re using Time Machine to a network share, I recommend keeping another “worst case” backup that you refresh periodically. The network disk is convenient which is good for having periodic backups and quick access but from time to time this setup is liable to Time Machine corrupting itself in a way it doesn’t know how to fix.)
- tverbeure 3y ago
  Yeah, I wrote this on a 2012 MacBook Pro running Mojave. My replacement MacBook Air 15” will be ready for pickup in a week. :-)
  - bombcar 3y ago
    You can still do this setup (I have it on Gentoo) but I also have a local SSD for when I’m docked. It alternates between them. Nowadays it’s done with some special extensions to samba instead, but it works the same.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  When Time Machine backups over the network, it creates a disk image and writes to that. So I don't understand why you would need APFS drivers on Linux?
fastaguy88 3y ago
Another cheap networked Time Machine solution is a used Intel Mac Mini (~$120 for 2.5 Ghz Intel i5, 8 GB Ram, 256 GB SSD), and set it up to export your time machine disks over the network. Not only is it "real" Time Machine, it allows you to add to an existing Time Machine disk that used to be plugged into your machine. No need to learn anything new.
siraben 3y ago
Is anyone else using borgbackup on their Mac? It lets me dedupe across OSes and computers, better than Time Machine. I’ve been using it for years and have accumulated some paths to exclude in my home folder, but constantly unsure if I should be excluding some other system metadata.
- DavideNL 3y ago
  Yes... you might find this useful: info on Exclusions [1] and Snapshots [2] [1] https://github.com/SterlingHooten/borg-backup-exclusions-macos https://github.com/SterlingHooten/borg-backup-exclusions-mac... [1] https://github.com/QuantumGhost/borg-tm https://github.com/QuantumGhost/borg-tm [2] https://gist.github.com/QuantumGhost/1aae8eb8527c9d522fe2a57f214f6ee5 https://gist.github.com/QuantumGhost/1aae8eb8527c9d522fe2a57... [3] https://torsion.org/borgmatic/ https://torsion.org/borgmatic/
- aborsy 3y ago
  Borg is better than Time Machine, for sure. Not tied to any company either.
manmal 3y ago
Apple Silicon MacBook Pros come with an SD slot. There are some MicroSD adapters (I use a BaseQi 303A) that are flush with the case - so flush infact that they are a bit hard to remove. Those are excellent for TimeMachine backups.
- gsora 3y ago
  MicroSD are notorious for being unreliable, especially cheap ones. What MicroSD are you using?
  - manmal 3y ago
    Use a good one, then. I haven’t spotted any issues after 18 months of use.
    - gsora 3y ago
      I explicitly asked for the model/maker of your microSD so that I could :-)
      - manmal 3y ago
        Mine is a SanDisk Extreme PRO 512 GB. But you could get e.g. one of the "High Endurance" ones if you are concerned about that. To add more context, I only use TimeMachine for the use case "I deleted something I haven't committed to Git and want to revert to the state of 1h ago". My real backup is offsite + encrypted (Arq + paid GDrive).
  - msh 3y ago
    Generally go for ones sold as for "industrial" use.
fluential 3y ago
I’m using “mega” for 20TB of media storage, they are sluggish with large amount of files so cli is very much of help. For personal documents I backup into mega separate folder copy of iCloud Drive directory on each device - de duplication handles everything. KopiaUI for offsite backups via sftp
newaccount74 3y ago
After years of struggling with a NAS from a well known manufacturer, my solution is a 2012 Mac Mini. I replaced the internal 2,5" HDD with an 8TB SATA SSD. Advantages: - extremely reliable - completely silent - low power usage - all in one (no external drives, no external power brick) Disadvantage: - no longer officially supports latest macOS
- lostlogin 3y ago
  Assuming you’re talking about Synology? Why is network attached storage so unreliable with macOS?
  - newaccount74 3y ago
    Time Machine itself worked okay on Synology, it was just slow, despite two 480GB SSD cache drives. My main issue were normal network shares where I had issues with unicode characters in filenames and with symbolic links. Depending on whether you'd use SMB or AFP one thing or another was broken. My Mac Mini now works flawlessly. Time Machine is still slow, though, I think it's just a slow protocol.
n8henrie 3y ago
My main TimeMachine backup (for my and my wife's MBPs) is over SMB to ZFS (RAIDZ2) on my NAS. Running pretty well for 2 years or so now. The only issues I've had seem to be related to running out of space with the quotas I've set (so I make sure I leave some space for my wife), since the ZFS snapshots prevent the TimeMachine's auto pruning mechanisms from freeing up space like it expects. Thankfully I was always able to ZFS roll back and find a recent a known good snapshot, manually prune old ZFS snapshots to make space, run a Time Machine verification, and keep going (after making a manual "known good" snapshot). Thankfully, I recently discovered the ZFS refquota setting that seems to have resolved the wonky dance above and lets my quotas work as TimeMachine expects (though extra space is used for my ZFS snapshots, which is fine because the TImeMachine stuff is only a small part of the array's storage). The only other issue I've had is with ZFS on arch (kernel upgrades / dkms issuss), so I recently moved to NixOS an it's been solid so far. TimeMachine backups over Tailscale are pretty sweet! Separately, I have a second TimeMachine backup to an AirPort Extreme-attached USB drive. I also use restic for cross-platform backups to the same NAS above, which then sends ZFS snapshots (of the TM + restic data) to a remote server. Finally I have a USB drive in a safe that I manually take out and run a locally-attached TimeMachine backup to every month or so. Keeping everything backed up was a (tongue-in-cheek) part of my wedding vows -- stakes are high.
chakintosh 3y ago
> My MacBook has 460GB of data. Time Machine backups are atomic: a backup either completes or it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the backup needs to start all over again. > Initially, backups were ridiculously slow: around 2 Mbits/s, meaning it would take around 21 days to back up the full drive. During that time, you can’t power cycle the server or take your laptop out of your wifi network or you need to start all over again. This is why I'd rather play with fire than subject myself to such stupid implementation of a basic backup function.
Havoc 3y ago
Remember to do offsite and 321 as well
therealmarv 3y ago
Don't use time machine, I would never trust it (basically unreliable from my experiences). Better use a fast external SSD only for backups and Carbon Copy Cloner regularly.
rbanffy 3y ago
I used to do a similar thing - I set up a Debian VM and let it serve netatalk and behave like a Time Capsule for my home network. Now I use a mix of iCloud to keep files in sync (DropBox to transport between Macs and Linux) and dock-attached local storage to host the Time Machine volumes.
ilyt 3y ago
... you probably want to just use Debian or Ubuntu instead of random fork that might or might not exist in 5 years
djoldman 3y ago
> My electricity rates are $0.56/kWh during peak hours and $0.25/kWh otherwise, for an average of $0.35/kWh. Wow, that's high compared to where I live.
dm_me_dogs 3y ago
I'm currently using Time Machine for my Macs, running on a Debian box that runs OpenMediaVault. It's a pretty simple switch to enable Time Machine on a network share, and it seems to work fine.
msephton 3y ago
It's not really $25, though, is it? It's over $100 plus replacement storage and my valuable time. Instead, I just turned on the Time Machine option on my Synology. Job done. In addition to network Time Machine I also run a local Time Machine on an external SSD. Backup redundancy is key. Also of note: I use a similar thin client running ESXi to run old Intel Windows VMs that I occasionally need. The cost of that one was also $25 plus replacement RAM and SSD.

254 points by picture 3y ago

Is netatalk the key thing here that makes it Time Machine compatible? The rest seems like standard DIY home server stuff.

jamesy0ung 3y ago
Yes, although Apple is deprecating AFP and now allows backup over SMB
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  A shame they still haven’t implemented the ability to target iCloud.
tverbeure 3y ago
Yes. There is nothing special about this, other than personally finding out that I could replace my failing Time Capsule for something so cheap.
housemusicfan 3y ago
Yeah this is as pointless as every "life hack" on YouTube. Haven't you been able to Time Machine backup to any HFS-formatted sparse bundle since forever? Located on literally ANY samba server - Windows, Linux, or ye olde NAS. I have personally done this for years. I don't get the novelty here unless you're into the "I built a submarine with parts I got off eBay" angle.
- tverbeure 3y ago
  I write these blog posts for primarily for myself, and hopefully because somebody might find them useful. I claim no novelty, there are no ads, no traffic tracking, there is no intention whatsoever to make money from it. But if my posts irritate some jerk on the Internet who has nothing better to do than spread negativity, then that’s definitely a nice unintended benefit. Do you need a hug?
  - rodgerd 3y ago
    > But if my posts irritate some jerk on the Internet who has nothing better to do than spread negativity, then that’s definitely a nice unintended benefit. Amen.
    - housemusicfan 3y ago
      > Amen. Inability to process criticism is how this industry gave us things like the Juicero.
      - tverbeure 3y ago
        When you see small time Sunday blogger pushing back against toxic negativity, your immediate reaction is “this is what got us Juicero”? Amazing. Ironically, the one thing Juicero got right is cutting their losses early and calling it a day.
  - housemusicfan 3y ago
    No malice intended, but I genuinely felt as if you had wasted your own time. Sorry if I don't subscribe to the usual HN tug-fest. If you learned something - good for you but I've been down this exact road many times before. Oftentimes I have to mentor younger engineers that there is often a much simpler solution if you can see the forest for the trees.
    - rfrey 3y ago
      So many asses out there excusing their self indulgent rude behaviour as "telling it like it is".
      - lostlogin 3y ago
        Season five (I think) of Silicon Valley covers ‘radical candor’ it’s very painful and is a bit like this.
- Forgeties79 3y ago
  We see projects like this almost daily on HN. Sometimes people just like to tinker and share, so yeah, the “I built a submarine with parts I got off eBay” type work can be fun and even useful. You never know who you might help! If that irritates you, this might not be the site for you.
satysin 3y ago
AppleTalk is deprecated by Apple for a few years now. You should really be using SMB for Time Machine.
alwillis 3y ago
> Is netatalk the key thing here that makes it Time Machine compatible? The rest seems like standard DIY home server stuff. The last update to AFP shipped with Mac OS X Mountain Lion in 2012 [1]. Nobody should be using AFP in 2023, unless you have no other choice. While you can use Time Machine to backup to an SMB share, ideally you want to use an APFS volume to get all of the benefits, especially if you're concerned about data integrity. You can read about using APFS network shares for Time Machine at The Eclectic Light Company [2], a Mac-focused blog/website by Howard Oakley. If you're interested in the details of how Time Machine works, nobody I'm aware of has written more about its details than he has [3]. He's written a slew of useful macOS utilities, including T2M2 for Time Machine [4]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol [2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/04/16/time-machine-to-apfs-using-a-network-share/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/04/16/time-machine-to-apfs-usi... [3]: https://eclecticlight.co/?s=time+machine https://eclecticlight.co/?s=time+machine [4]: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/09/29/going-beyond-t2m2-with-mints-grokking-time-machine-to-apfs/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/09/29/going-beyond-t2m2-with-m...
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  Time Machine created an APFS sparse bundle on the SMB share. How is an APFS sparse bundle on an APFS volume better than an APFS sparse bundle on another volume?

mberning 3y ago

Synology has nice support for time machine backups. Very easy to set up in DSM.

murphyslaw 3y ago
Yh, and even they can't get it right. You lose connectivity once in a while and the only way to recover is to erase the backup and start over. I came here to see if someone had built a macos native time machine, but this looks like just another hack.
- climb_stealth 3y ago
  Just posted this in another comment as well. Ditch Time Machine altogether. Use Carbon Copy Cloner instead. It backs up straight to a network drive. Been using it with my Synology for years. Using Time Machine is playing russian roulette with backup data.
  - krackers 3y ago
    In the pre-APFS days, there was one difference in that using time machine would give you snapshots whereas CCC would only be a "dest like source" backup (safetynet would preserve deleted files, but not version modified ones). You could work around this with ZFS snapshots on the destination, but since it's not natively supported it's all a bit clunky. With APFS you get snapshots too, so the only real difference is the UI for restoring a snapshot. I do wish Apple would allow 3rd party applications to populate "versions", so the inbuilt UI could be used with other apps. It could even fit with their existing Finder extensions: it could bring together different versions of a file on cloud providers, local backups, etc., and present them in a unified UI.
pridkett 3y ago
A superpower of doing Time Machine backups to a Synology is that you can put it on a BTRFS drive with automatic snapshotting. About once a year something seems to happen that causes Time Machine to give a “whoopsie, gotta start over from the beginning again!” sort of error. I’ve found that going back a day or two with snapshots on BTRFS fixes the problem.

scorxn 3y ago

I have a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole and Time Machine, making that little board probably the best value piece of tech I've ever owned. https://saschaeggi.medium.com/use-a-raspberry-pi-4-for-time-machine-works-with-big-sur-1e66a9650789 https://saschaeggi.medium.com/use-a-raspberry-pi-4-for-time-... is what I followed.

satysin 3y ago
I use a Synology now but I used a Pi for a couple of years before that without issue. I did give it to my daughter to use at university but I very much doubt she actually used it and I've not thought about asking until this post :^)
tverbeure 3y ago
RPis are great hobby electronics projects, but IMO they don’t have any benefit for this kind of use over a thin client? They’re more expensive, you need an extra RPi enclosure and power supply, you can’t use M.2 SSD sticks without an additional USB3 enclosure, they have a history of corrupting flash cards, and their idle power is only a little bit lower.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Can confirm about MicroSD flash cards, they're too unreliable for stuff that must be on 24/7, and get corrupt easily. Good for tinkering projects and media players, not for critical stuff where the downtime needed to pull the card and fsck/reinstall it might not be an option.
  - zikduruqe 3y ago
    I've been running a weather website on a RPi2 since 2014. And it's on the same SD card. MicroSD cards don't get corrupted as much as the interwebz says they do.
    - tverbeure 3y ago
      It has probably to do with the number of unmanaged power cycles. A hobby electronics project will see many of those. A weather station may only see them when the power in the neighbor goes down.

climb_stealth 3y ago

My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be no support and the forums are not going to help. The broken backup is not going to be able to be repaired. Time Machine uses the "fuck you user" approach of not providing any information about what it does, or doesn't, or intends to do or whatever. If your data is worth backing up, don't use Time Machine. [0] https://bombich.com https://bombich.com

firecall 3y ago
My advice is to use TimeMachine plus other backups. I use: 1. TimeMachine on a 20TB TrueNAS ZFS setup 2. BackBlaze 3. ...not a versioned backup, but iCloud Synching, which is a useful disaster recovery.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Brajeshwar 3y ago
  I've found that the ideal size of Timemachine drive is just about twice of the target drive. It last for months if not years -- enough to go back. Beyond that, there must be an archival/backup system in place if you still want to get back files deleted years ago.
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    In my experience there's no need to worry about long term disk usage of Time Machine. The backup is going to get in a bad state and start failing to add new backups, requiring you to wipe it and start over before the drive fills up.
    - hoorible 3y ago

firecall 3y ago

Running TrueNAS on an ex-lease Dell Micro 7060 with a bunch of USB 4TB drives, is currently the best Time Machine destination I've ever used; fast, reliable, always available.

unix_fan 3y ago
Do you have a ZFS pool on each drive?
- firecall 3y ago
  I keep it simple. I'm not confident with ZFS terminology, but here goes: I have one TimeMachine Pool: Then a single RAIDZ1 with 5x 4TB external USB3 drives connected via a powered TP-Link hub. I'm aware this is suboptimal on a couple of fronts; • USB Drives • 5x drives in a RAIDZ1 • Standard RAM, not ECC But the drives are what I had, and the 7060 Micro was super cheap ex-lease. I grabbed cheap used 32GB RAM from a local forum connection. After seven months it's been super reliable, no issues. I run 2x 515GB mirrored USB-C Samsung SSD drives as a VM-Pool, which is where I store my Linux VMs. My Linux VMs run database backups, my Dashy Dashboard, a few Docker containers and general dev-ops experiments. The 7060 itself has 32GB RAM and boots from mirrored 256GB internal SSD/NVME drives. I should probably do a Blog post on the utility of Ex-Lease Dell Micros over going Raspberry Pi or similar. I'm a huge fan :-)

maxmalkav 3y ago

I opened the link mostly to see which thin client model the author chose, to discover it is a HP T520, a machine it happens I also own an unit. I cannot comment on TimeMachine, but regarding hardware + Linux, it has been a more stable server than equivalent RPi or Odroid SBCs while not consuming much more power and just having a bigger size.

chris37879 3y ago

I just checked the box in unsaid for “make this share a Time Machine volume”, and added the unsaid machine and my MacBook to tailscale, configured the disk over tailscale and now I have remote Time Machine anywhere I have internet. This appliance seems like a good ticket if you just want a time capsule replacement, though.

st3fan 3y ago

I’m not sure if AFP (via Netatalk) is really the right thing to use. I’m pretty sure that “native” Time Machine now prefera CIFS (Samba) over the network.

mustache_kimono 3y ago
> I’m not sure if AFP (via Netatalk) is really the right thing to use. For years, Netatalk was still the more dependable solution, despite the deprecation warnings. I've had very good luck re: my current set up (ZFS and Samba 4.15.13 on Ubuntu 22.04) but Netatalk I believe still works very well.
- donatj 3y ago
  Agreed, I still generally have much better luck with Netatalk which is why I have kept using it all these years.
hoherd 3y ago
Correct. > If given the choice between SMB and AFP, use SMB to back up to your external backup disk. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/types-of-disks-you-can-use-with-time-machine-mh15139/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/types-of-disks-you-...
tverbeure 3y ago
Thanks! I've added a warning at the top of the blog post, and will revisit next weekend.

solarkraft 3y ago

Thin clients are great, I got a Fujitsu Futro. Bohdi Linux: Interesting choice. Personally I've tried to set up Samba as a Time Machine backend twice and with both setups the initial backup would just completely lock up after a while. I might try again with Netatalk, but thought AFP was deprecated.

harry8 3y ago
Time machine with netatalk, I use the technique described here: https://palvelimet.net/1116/ https://palvelimet.net/1116/ Took about 5 minutes, Works for me.
tverbeure 3y ago
Somebody on Twitter recommended the Futro as well, but they seem to be a European thing. There are none for sale on US eBay.

Jedd 3y ago

I note that $25 got the author 16GB of storage - another $70 was spent on boosting that to 2TB. For GNU/Linux users - but will obviously work just fine for Microsoft and Apple clients - a good combination is SyncThing on local + remote mini-server, with BorgBackup running on just the server side. SyncThing gives you near-instant synchronisation, and BorgBackup gives you periodic archives (at your periodicity & retention preferences). For isolation purposes, I went for a small-footprint VM for each family member, and instructed that anything they really care about needs to go into ~/work/ or ~/private/ to be looked after.

puzzlingcaptcha 3y ago
You can often get those for as little as $10 these days, I paid $25 in 2020. Interestingly the APU supports AES-NI and has a little crypto accelerator for SHA (unlike RPi which didn't splurge the extra dollar on Armv8 Cryptography Extensions). I'd recommend going for t620 over the t520 for double the cores at the same idle power draw (6.5W). If you are fine with just two cores Fujitsu Futro s520 is also great. https://heap.ovh/tag/thin-client.html https://heap.ovh/tag/thin-client.html

sandreas 3y ago

I don't trust Time Machine any more. Years ago I wrote some shell scripts that help me mostly automate my complete system setup (with brew and friends). From time to time, I wipe my entire system and restore it with these scripts. Sometimes I have to adjust them, but mostly, they work without changes. For my data backups, I use restic. Big advantage is, that I can read my backups even when I don't have a macOS system present (e.g. my only macOS system had a hardware issue and my Time Machine Backup was pretty much useless until I got a new one). I know, this solution is not for everybody, but Time Machine corrupted my backups more than 5 times now and it feels so slow compared to restic, that I don't even think about retrying it after a new macOS release any more - even if my solution is a bit more work to do.

tailspin2019 3y ago
What destination(s) do you backup to with Restic? I've been thinking about giving it a try.
- sandreas 3y ago
  My home nas and via zfs send the off site nas from my parents.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Just start with an external usb drive. You can pickup 8tb for under $200. If you want to go the extra step, you can buy two or three and physically swap them every N weeks. Store the older one at a different location. Far less sophisticated than a real NAS, but also fewer moving pieces and things to go wrong.
- mfashby 3y ago
  Local NAS and backblaze. It works well.
  - core-utility 3y ago
    If you're using Backblaze B2, check out Wasabi instead. I saved a good amount of money by moving.

tambourine_man 3y ago

$25 used

pcurve 3y ago

"Don’t worry, I also use BackBlaze for automated off-site backups. And all my projects are stored on GitHub and different PCs as well" That's smart. I've had 7 catastrophic drive failure in 20 years, 4 when I was using homegrown backup. Due to my being sloppy / lazy, I still managed to lose a lot of data in 2 of the instances. Homegrown backup solution isn't for me. :)

syntaxing 3y ago

Home storage is the only thing I don't do a DIY solution. I used to run a samba server with timemachine settings and pointed it to an external SSD. But now I just run a Synology NAS with a RAID configuration. Definitely more expensive than $25 but worth the peace of mind IMO.

andrewbutts 3y ago

After losing a decade of archived email from friends and family to a Time Machine failure, I never turned it on ever again. You had one job.

saagarjha 3y ago

Ok so like this seems to have been written today but I think it’s notable that the Mac they showed in the post is running a five year old version of macOS: I don’t actually think this is a good idea anymore, and I say this as someone who ran a Raspberry Pi in a similar configuration for a while. Today, if you’re using Time Machine, you should back up to an APFS volume with snapshots. They are far faster and more reliable than HFS+ disks. I get the feeling that macOS might at some point stop supporting new HFS+ backups altogether. So, I wouldn’t recommend making them anymore. Unfortunately, APFS drivers for Linux kinda sorta don’t exist. Not to the point where you’d want to rely on them for backups, anyways. So the move here is really to just get a Mac to handle this. My network has an old MacBook Pro (one of the last pre-Touch Bar ones) wired into the backbone for this. It’s pricey but believe me, this is the setup you want. (By the way, if you’re using Time Machine to a network share, I recommend keeping another “worst case” backup that you refresh periodically. The network disk is convenient which is good for having periodic backups and quick access but from time to time this setup is liable to Time Machine corrupting itself in a way it doesn’t know how to fix.)

tverbeure 3y ago
Yeah, I wrote this on a 2012 MacBook Pro running Mojave. My replacement MacBook Air 15” will be ready for pickup in a week. :-)
- bombcar 3y ago
  You can still do this setup (I have it on Gentoo) but I also have a local SSD for when I’m docked. It alternates between them. Nowadays it’s done with some special extensions to samba instead, but it works the same.
newaccount74 3y ago
When Time Machine backups over the network, it creates a disk image and writes to that. So I don't understand why you would need APFS drivers on Linux?

fastaguy88 3y ago

Another cheap networked Time Machine solution is a used Intel Mac Mini (~$120 for 2.5 Ghz Intel i5, 8 GB Ram, 256 GB SSD), and set it up to export your time machine disks over the network. Not only is it "real" Time Machine, it allows you to add to an existing Time Machine disk that used to be plugged into your machine. No need to learn anything new.

siraben 3y ago

Is anyone else using borgbackup on their Mac? It lets me dedupe across OSes and computers, better than Time Machine. I’ve been using it for years and have accumulated some paths to exclude in my home folder, but constantly unsure if I should be excluding some other system metadata.

DavideNL 3y ago
Yes... you might find this useful: info on Exclusions [1] and Snapshots [2] [1] https://github.com/SterlingHooten/borg-backup-exclusions-macos https://github.com/SterlingHooten/borg-backup-exclusions-mac... [1] https://github.com/QuantumGhost/borg-tm https://github.com/QuantumGhost/borg-tm [2] https://gist.github.com/QuantumGhost/1aae8eb8527c9d522fe2a57f214f6ee5 https://gist.github.com/QuantumGhost/1aae8eb8527c9d522fe2a57... [3] https://torsion.org/borgmatic/ https://torsion.org/borgmatic/
aborsy 3y ago
Borg is better than Time Machine, for sure. Not tied to any company either.

manmal 3y ago

Apple Silicon MacBook Pros come with an SD slot. There are some MicroSD adapters (I use a BaseQi 303A) that are flush with the case - so flush infact that they are a bit hard to remove. Those are excellent for TimeMachine backups.

gsora 3y ago
MicroSD are notorious for being unreliable, especially cheap ones. What MicroSD are you using?
- manmal 3y ago
  Use a good one, then. I haven’t spotted any issues after 18 months of use.
  - gsora 3y ago
    I explicitly asked for the model/maker of your microSD so that I could :-)
    - manmal 3y ago
      Mine is a SanDisk Extreme PRO 512 GB. But you could get e.g. one of the "High Endurance" ones if you are concerned about that. To add more context, I only use TimeMachine for the use case "I deleted something I haven't committed to Git and want to revert to the state of 1h ago". My real backup is offsite + encrypted (Arq + paid GDrive).
- msh 3y ago
  Generally go for ones sold as for "industrial" use.

fluential 3y ago

I’m using “mega” for 20TB of media storage, they are sluggish with large amount of files so cli is very much of help. For personal documents I backup into mega separate folder copy of iCloud Drive directory on each device - de duplication handles everything. KopiaUI for offsite backups via sftp

newaccount74 3y ago

After years of struggling with a NAS from a well known manufacturer, my solution is a 2012 Mac Mini. I replaced the internal 2,5" HDD with an 8TB SATA SSD. Advantages: - extremely reliable - completely silent - low power usage - all in one (no external drives, no external power brick) Disadvantage: - no longer officially supports latest macOS

lostlogin 3y ago
Assuming you’re talking about Synology? Why is network attached storage so unreliable with macOS?
- newaccount74 3y ago
  Time Machine itself worked okay on Synology, it was just slow, despite two 480GB SSD cache drives. My main issue were normal network shares where I had issues with unicode characters in filenames and with symbolic links. Depending on whether you'd use SMB or AFP one thing or another was broken. My Mac Mini now works flawlessly. Time Machine is still slow, though, I think it's just a slow protocol.

n8henrie 3y ago

My main TimeMachine backup (for my and my wife's MBPs) is over SMB to ZFS (RAIDZ2) on my NAS. Running pretty well for 2 years or so now. The only issues I've had seem to be related to running out of space with the quotas I've set (so I make sure I leave some space for my wife), since the ZFS snapshots prevent the TimeMachine's auto pruning mechanisms from freeing up space like it expects. Thankfully I was always able to ZFS roll back and find a recent a known good snapshot, manually prune old ZFS snapshots to make space, run a Time Machine verification, and keep going (after making a manual "known good" snapshot). Thankfully, I recently discovered the ZFS refquota setting that seems to have resolved the wonky dance above and lets my quotas work as TimeMachine expects (though extra space is used for my ZFS snapshots, which is fine because the TImeMachine stuff is only a small part of the array's storage). The only other issue I've had is with ZFS on arch (kernel upgrades / dkms issuss), so I recently moved to NixOS an it's been solid so far. TimeMachine backups over Tailscale are pretty sweet! Separately, I have a second TimeMachine backup to an AirPort Extreme-attached USB drive. I also use restic for cross-platform backups to the same NAS above, which then sends ZFS snapshots (of the TM + restic data) to a remote server. Finally I have a USB drive in a safe that I manually take out and run a locally-attached TimeMachine backup to every month or so. Keeping everything backed up was a (tongue-in-cheek) part of my wedding vows -- stakes are high.

chakintosh 3y ago

> My MacBook has 460GB of data. Time Machine backups are atomic: a backup either completes or it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the backup needs to start all over again. > Initially, backups were ridiculously slow: around 2 Mbits/s, meaning it would take around 21 days to back up the full drive. During that time, you can’t power cycle the server or take your laptop out of your wifi network or you need to start all over again. This is why I'd rather play with fire than subject myself to such stupid implementation of a basic backup function.

Havoc 3y ago

Remember to do offsite and 321 as well

therealmarv 3y ago

Don't use time machine, I would never trust it (basically unreliable from my experiences). Better use a fast external SSD only for backups and Carbon Copy Cloner regularly.

rbanffy 3y ago

I used to do a similar thing - I set up a Debian VM and let it serve netatalk and behave like a Time Capsule for my home network. Now I use a mix of iCloud to keep files in sync (DropBox to transport between Macs and Linux) and dock-attached local storage to host the Time Machine volumes.

ilyt 3y ago

... you probably want to just use Debian or Ubuntu instead of random fork that might or might not exist in 5 years

djoldman 3y ago

> My electricity rates are $0.56/kWh during peak hours and $0.25/kWh otherwise, for an average of $0.35/kWh. Wow, that's high compared to where I live.

dm_me_dogs 3y ago

I'm currently using Time Machine for my Macs, running on a Debian box that runs OpenMediaVault. It's a pretty simple switch to enable Time Machine on a network share, and it seems to work fine.

msephton 3y ago

It's not really $25, though, is it? It's over $100 plus replacement storage and my valuable time. Instead, I just turned on the Time Machine option on my Synology. Job done. In addition to network Time Machine I also run a local Time Machine on an external SSD. Backup redundancy is key. Also of note: I use a similar thin client running ESXi to run old Intel Windows VMs that I occasionally need. The cost of that one was also $25 plus replacement RAM and SSD.