FreeBSD, Samba, and Time Machine

Time Machine backups on network shares in Leopard

As much as Apple would like you to think that their “Time Capsule” is the only solution for network backups with Time Machine, many have already begun hacking away in order to enable remote Time Machine backups on their favorite Rock Solid™ servers.

Since I already had a USB drive that I used exclusively for Time Machine, the only preperation that I needed to do was to reformat it as UFS2 and mount it on my FreeBSD server and give the mountpoint the correct permissions. I’ll exlpain that in more detail as we move along.

While my FreeBSD box was building a new UFS filesystem on the USB drive, I went through flokru’s guide on how to create a sparsebundle Disk Image locally, to then copy over to the server.

In order to provide the network mount for the Time Machine sparse bundle to be accessed across the network, I congifured Samba to export out the entire USB drive. In order for the Samba share to work correctly, the entire drive is set to a similar permissions scheme as the /tmp directory, with all users able to write to the drive, but with a sticky-bit enabled to prevent deletion or otherwise tampering with another’s time machine backup.

Also, make sure to lock down your time machine backup by removing read and execute privileges from group and other fields.