Custom TimeMachine Server

[Ph03n1xx]

I've always liked the AirPort, and since it's been deprecated firmware-wise, I never really enjoyed the idea of getting a used one. I have a fair bit of knowledge around Linux and microcomputers, so I decided to make my own a few months ago. It's a bit slow at the moment since I'm running it on a Raspberry Pi 3b+; however, it's pretty solid. Sluggish bandwidth over Ethernet and WiFi but for weekly backups it doesn't take much longer opposed to on device. I even put metadata on it so it shows up on my Mac as an AirPort too.


Has anybody here tried doing this? If you have, what kind of hardware did/do you run, and how has your experience been with it?

 

[DJLC]

I run TrueNAS Scale on an old Dell PowerEdge tower for this (among other things). Works great, no complaints. macOS shows it with an Xserve RAID icon. Close enough, I guess. 😜

 

[Ph03n1xx]

I run TrueNAS Scale on an old Dell PowerEdge tower for this (among other things). Works great, no complaints. macOS shows it with an Xserve RAID icon. Close enough, I guess. 😜

That's awesome! I'm really starting to experiment with self hosted services so it's really cool to see others doing the same thing. I'm heavily considering a M715Q to switch over to from the Pi. Definitely not the best piece of hardware in the world to have a ton of containers running on haha

 

[mfram]

My home "server" is a Raspberry Pi 5 running Gentoo Linux. Have a USB hard drive enclosure that hosts 4 drives. I'm using the Linux RAID driver to protect the data on the drives. It is served to my Mac using Samba and avahi (mDNS). Works great for Time Machine as long as you look up the magic for configuring avahi and Samba properly for Time Machine clients.