

Complete Hacker Tutorial to getting Time Machine over NFS to work. - a904guy
http://blog.mediafederation.com/andy-hawkins/mac-os-x-time-machine-via-nfs-on-linux-ubuntu-complete-guide-fixes-error-13-etc/

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jrockway
Why does the title contain "Complete Hacker Tutorial"? Wouldn't "How I got
Time Machine over NFS to Work" be a less linkbait-ish title?

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hansef
Damnit, you beat me to my bitching.

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__david__
Why use NFS over AFP or SMB? The technique is basically the same but at least
AFP and SMB are encrypted...

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jws
For AFP on anything but OS X, netatalk was missing a flush-to-disk command and
failed the last time I surveyed.

Various samba versions have been implicated in backups that are corrupt when
when you go to read them. There are enough people successfully using samba now
for time capsule that I suspect that issue is a thing of the past or
restricted to certain NAS devices.

Time Machine is a big enough bandwidth user that I presume we are talking LAN,
and for many people their LAN is secure enough.

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a904guy
Shows the need for xattr on your NFS mounts, that is not documented in other
tutorials I've found.

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xpaulbettsx
I'm not 100% sure on this, but from what I remember most filesystems now have
xattr enabled by default.

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a904guy
I thought the same. I tested EXT4 on a fresh Ubuntu 10.10 system. My variables
wouldn't save till I declared it.

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iuguy
That's interesting. But how does the restore work? Is this something that you
can run from an install DVD?

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a904guy
The restore works just like any other Time Machine restore. In critical data
loss when the machine has to be formatted. You will be able to restore the
system completely from the Time Machine. Just remount the NFS on the new OS
and run to command so Time Machine will see NFS mounts and click Restore.

~@

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vl
Will it automount? I don't see any specific steps to make it automount. SMB
shares setup this way don't automount for me.

What happens on the public network? Is it still going to try to find the
volume by IP address and back up?

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jonhohle
I do Time Machine over AFP, but a more interesting tutorial would be Time
Machine over iSCSI+SSH. In fact, that might make for a fun project next
weekend.

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xpaulbettsx
Is Time Machine actually practical for anyone on HN? It seems as if for anyone
who has a non-trivial amount of changing data on their laptop, Time Machine
would be completely ineffective over a Wifi network (or even wired) - it would
just be constantly transferring data and thrashing disks; on my desktop, I
could barely afford even 1 complete backup, yet most of the data being backed
up is cache files / stuff I don't care about losing.

Am I wrong on this? I've never actually tried to get it set up... does it deal
with times where the file share isn't connected?

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icefox
"I've never actually tried to get it set up..."

You could say that again. I bet you don't do any backups at all. Time machine
has two options. The first is the location to backup and the second is
directories to exclude. Ignoring cache files is one click away...

I used to have all sorts of different backup systems and even hacked my own
backup system on top of time machine like in this article, but at the end of
the day went out and picked up a Time Machine. It just works. Backups silently
in the background and I can recover when needed. I nearly always backup over
wifi and never feel it "thrashing disks" or using all my network speed. The
hd's that ship with Time Machine are also pre-tested for quality so are not
the cheapo hd of the week. Time Machine is also a wiki box, printer, and gig
switch.

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kgermino
I think you're confusing Time Machine (the backup software on OSX) with Time
Capsule (Apple's network backup hardware). Not a big deal but in this context
it can be confusing.

<http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/>

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rw2-
Wow, a real Hacker. He is able to setup NFS on Ubuntu. ;)

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a904guy
Sarcasm and 14 Karma... original. ;)

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rw2-
Now you can see what I mean^^

