My macbook USB timemachine drive became full and I wanted to make a backup before upgrading, so I thought I would try and utilize the TB's of space I had on my Linux server jbod's.
So there were many articles on the web which outlining how to do this. None really worked from start to finish but most contained the following general steps.
Step 1. Creat a sparse bundle using Disk Utility
Step 2. Copy the sparse bundle to your target network drive
Step 3. Mount the network drive on your Mac
Step 5. Some suggestions about running tmutil setdestination <target volume> (turned out to be unneccesary in my case)
Step 4. Fire up Time machine and select the sparse bundle.
I'm running El-Capitan and none of these steps worked for me when I tried exporting the filesystems as SMB, NFS . Each time I tried to run the tmutil command I would get locking errors etc.
About to put this into the not supported box and give up. I read an article about Time Machine only supporting AFP. So I downloaded and build the latest version of netatalk and followed the instructions here on the sourceforge page
Note: You also need to install and start Avahi before Netatalk.
Once I had installed & started netatalk on linux, I fired up TimeMachine on my mac and the linux served Time machine sparse bundle was visible and I completed a succesful backup of around 500GB.
There are few tests I still have to do, the main being can I restore from the image 🙂
My question to the community, is anyone making timemachine backups to remote volumes in this manner with sucess and confidence?
