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Comment by trillic

1 day ago

I use this for networked Time Machine backups for multiple Macs in my household. Works just as well over tailscale VPN.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Netatalk

One of my COVID projects was to set up a networked Time Machine backup on Raspberry Pi.

Every single one of the blogspam sites (lifehacker, howtogeek, etc.) told you to use AFP/HFS+/Netatalk. I had so many problems with this. Time Machine would work well the first few times and then slow to a crawl. If there was a power outage, look out. The whole thing would be corrupted. It wasn't the network. FTP and scp worked just fine.

Eventually I found one blog that told you how to do it with SMB and ext4. It was that site that I learned about the much malignment of AFP and HFS+. SMB/ext4 worked like a charm. Six years later and not a single hiccup.

Also works for System 7 based Macintoshes. In case you got frozen in a glacier in 1991.

  • Nah, classic Macintosh OSes aren't compatible with modern AFP.

    • They are compatible with netatalk though. The project split between version 2 and 3, but in recent releases they folded them back into a single thing. Current netatalk releases support all versions of AFP.