Okay, I see that this has been discussed some and I've tried to make sense of the threads however some are a bit old and I'd like to touch base on this please and check for updated information.

 

Here's my situation.. I am going to be gifting an unRAID server to a family of folks who badly need storage. These are not the sorts of people who will be delving into arcane commandlines and spending hours figuring out problems. They do however need storage for their home computers - Apple Mac Pros. To help set the hook and get them to use the server for more than just a few word docs and hopefully backups of their music I would like to get Time Machine working for them. Currently they have NO backups of ANY sort! I have built a small Pro licensed server for them with some spare drives. I have Simple Menu installed, SMB enabled, and AFP enabled. I have tweaked it to use the latest stable SAMBA. The issue I run into is that I have NO clue about Mac products if it's not IOS and the words "sparse bundle" make my eyes cross. I'm willing to learn about this and work to get things going but I have no Mac available to me here and since this is a surprise I cannot use theirs yet until this is working. I also do not know how much disk space these backups may take blah blah so I'm looking for pointers. I have checked the Wiki but sadly not found a kindergarten level page for setting this up - no page at all actually.

 

Do I need to load any additional software onto the server? I saw something about updating AFP in one of the threads below, is this still applicable and if so what are the current packages to load? Can I use a standard share for this or must something be designated specifically for this? When complete, will I need to babysit anything for them or should it just work? Can this be done in a straightforward way or am I diving into a hornet's nest?

 

For ref: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5184.msg56380#msg56380 & http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5938.msg109732#msg109732

 

I know that this has had discussion in the past but I'd like to have something up to date and concise so that I can put final touches on this box, slap a bow on it, and surprise them for Christmas.

 

Thanks you!

 

P.S. Oh, this is on 5.0-rc8a which is running nicely on some CHEAP AMD hardware 

If they all use macs then you are wasting your time messing with SMB.

 

Turn it off.

 

You need AFP only and you need to export the drives via AFP with the timemachine option.

 

Do not use a cache drive and do not enable drive spanning. (I.e. User shares over two or more disks).

 

Two reasons: It doesn't like it and performance is atrocious.

If they all use macs then you are wasting your time messing with SMB.

 

Turn it off.

 

You need AFP only and you need to export the drives via AFP with the timemachine option.

 

Do not use a cache drive and do not enable drive spanning. (I.e. User shares over two or more disks).

 

Two reasons: It doesn't like it and performance is atrocious.

 

There are still some Windows machines around on the network although possibly won't be using this server. A Linux based XBMC machine will certainly be using it though. I've boxed it up to give them tonight but I will explore the AFP options more closely and perhaps dedicate a disk for this purpose. I hadn't realized that I could export drives with AFP specifically or that there was even a Time Machine option so some exploring to be done for sure - thank you!!

 

P.S. No cache drive in any of my machines these days but thank you for the heads up!

If they all use macs then you are wasting your time messing with SMB.

 

Turn it off.

 

You need AFP only and you need to export the drives via AFP with the timemachine option.

 

Do not use a cache drive and do not enable drive spanning. (I.e. User shares over two or more disks).

 

Two reasons: It doesn't like it and performance is atrocious.

 

There are still some Windows machines around on the network although possibly won't be using this server. A Linux based XBMC machine will certainly be using it though. I've boxed it up to give them tonight but I will explore the AFP options more closely and perhaps dedicate a disk for this purpose. I hadn't realized that I could export drives with AFP specifically or that there was even a Time Machine option so some exploring to be done for sure - thank you!!

 

P.S. No cache drive in any of my machines these days but thank you for the heads up!

 

Yes, dedicate a single disk for TM and don't do it through a user share.

I use User shares for my TM backups. A separate user share for each Mac client allows the TimeMachine volume size limit to limit each machine to a set amount of space and more than one TM user share per disk. Although, each TM user share only includes a single disk.

I use User shares for my TM backups. A separate user share for each Mac client allows the TimeMachine volume size limit to limit each machine to a set amount of space and more than one TM user share per disk. Although, each TM user share only includes a single disk.

I am going the same.

I have one 3TB disk with 4x 500MB Time Machine Shares on it for 4 different Macs.

 

When I had one share for 4 Macs, I was having issues with my 2 Mac Pros. They keep saying the backup was corrupt.