TimeMachine backups on FreeBSD-10
I usually work on a Macbook, and I use keyless ssh with a cron job to do nightly backups. It works very well. However, I decided to try backups with Time Machine, using my FreeBSD-10 server as the host.
The first step is to install netatalk3, and nss_mdns
pkg install netatalk3 pkg install nss_mdns
avahi needs mDNS, so that needs to be configured in /etc/nsswitch.conf. Ensure that this line exists:
hosts: files dns mdns
Finally, configure netatalk. My configuration in /usr/local/etc/afp.conf looks like
[Global] vol preset = default_for_all_vol log file = /var/log/netatalk.log hosts allow = 192.168.77.0/24 mimic model = TimeCapsule6,116 [default_for_all_vol] file perm = 0640 directory perm = 0750 cnid scheme = dbd [Homes] basedir regex = /storage/home time machine = yes
You’ll need to start dbus, avahi, and netatalk, like this:
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/dbus onestart /usr/local/etc/rc.d/avahi-daemon onestart /usr/local/etc/rc.d/netatalk onestart
The next step takes place on your OS X client machine. On each host that will perform backups, enable Time Machine to see non-TM volumes:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Then, mount your user’s share using afp://. This will make the share visible to TimeMachine.
After this, you should be able to see your Netatalk shares in Time Machine, and perform backups
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 is not needed for netatalk volumes. Only for SMB shares.
There is no mention that it is necessary to create something like a HFS+ formatted (growing) sparsebundle disk image to write the TimeMachine data to. Is this not necessary any more? I had to do that on my 10.7 machines.
In fact i’m just testing this myself here with a Mavericks install.
I did’t need to do that. In my case I used a UFS disk. In this later article, I used ZFS.
Don’t forget to add the following to /etc/rc.conf so it starts on reboot
dbus_enable=”YES”
vahi_daemon_enable=”YES”
netatalk_enable=”YES”
Still works on freebsd 13 in a jail!