Some people for whom I provide some kinds of support with gateway pis, use Macs. For the pc folk – at least for those on Windows 10, I’ve been seting up to do the filehistory thing, and putting the filehistory onto the /backup drive on the gateway pi. Then it gets sent here overnight. I wanted to do the same for the folks who have Macs, of which there are several.

Turns out that in later versions of Samba (4.8? something like that), one can cause Samba to offer time machine services. A friend sent me a link to this article on the Samba Wiki which explains various parameters. My initial efforts first with various attempts using netatalk weren’t very successful, and the early samba experiements also failed owing to the version of samba. But when I got a recent samba, bingo.

Most of the gateway pis are on stretch, and I have to upgrade to buster for a good enough version of samba. But I have done it, and it works. I did my next door neighbor’s gateway pi, so his wife’s mac could be backed up. It is working.

I initially tried the Stretch to Buster upgrade on the remote (next door) pi, but it got to a point that it had to kill the ssh daemon (which was my connection). This MAY have been owing to something which is fixable, but maybe not. In any case most of these gateways have 32GB disks, and I think that won’t be enough. I changed out the disk for a 128GB ones and physically put it in and rebooted the pi. I think I will similarly replace with bigger disks already formatted with buster for the 2 others where I want to support Macs with timemachine.