Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: vallor Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: Time machine backups Date: 8 Jan 2025 04:22:41 GMT Lines: 56 Message-ID: References: <8b262a1f-507f-ef10-e4d3-a981dca5b7d1@example.net> <4RVeP.812124$bYV2.164030@fx17.iad> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net qfHrSWr664ZKMobSH6DB3gnLa7EIFfyLlVo2s3Yc+zjJhsvwXA Cancel-Lock: sha1:4YbZnToS/e2VNx8tb/SED9pP358= sha256:XKhu3waThUZuWTwlTB0HG92zPMUTXxO3k6K+/P/+9S0= X-Face: +McU)#<-H?9lTb(Th!zR`EpVrp<0)1p5CmPu.kOscy8LRp_\u`:tW;dxPo./(fCl CaKku`)]}.V/"6rISCIDP` User-Agent: Pan/0.161 (Hmm2; c45f6052; Linux-6.12.8) Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:63960 On Wed, 8 Jan 2025 02:49:11 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote in : > On 2025-01-07, vallor 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? 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. Here's the web page with the recipe I followed: https://blog.jhnr.ch/2023/01/09/setup-apple-time-machine-network-drive-with-samba-on-ubuntu-22.04/ I _assume_ it's space efficient, with either incremental or differential backups -- but I'm watching it carefully to make sure that turns out to be the case. Our Mac Studio is named "Mac Studio". On the server side, I see in the share's directory a subdirectory, "Mac Studio.sparsebundle", which contains various files and directories, including one named "bands". That directory contains multiple files of length 536870912 bytes, which would seem to be the backup(s) themselves, in a structure managed by MacOS. 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.) -- -v System76 Thelio Mega v1.1 x86_64 NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti OS: Linux 6.12.8 Release: Mint 21.3 Mem: 258G "If at first you don't succeed, then Sky Diving is not for you!"