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Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 12:46 pm
by schox
A big thank you for this work :!:

Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 5:07 pm
by dforbes
An updated update to the above: She's dead jim. Each time it created a backup, it tried to create a new sparsebundle.

I've given up for now and just reformatted one of my drives with 500gb of clear space in a seperate partition for time machine backups.
:)

I know - this is the point I've been wrestling with for some time. You can get a bit further by "freezing" the greyhole partition and then thawing it after the backup is done, but somewhere along the line, when greyhole moves the files, netatalk gets upset. Certain CIFS mount options also help a bit, but on a big backup it is still too unreliable to use. I'm considering whether writing a custom vfs layer for netatalk or a FUSE implementation of greyhole are the way forward; neither are terribly attractive!

DF

Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2012 11:40 am
by schox
Hi

Just a quick question - Have anyone tested this with "Mountain Lion"? - I´m afraid of upgrading OSX if this come with the risk of having no backup to return to Lion.

Apple has been eager to mess up 3. party HW support - and want everyone to use a Apple only network :)

Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 8:39 pm
by jwpettit
Hi I'm new here, nice to meet everybody!

To answer the question of Schox, I installed the Amahi Time Machine app on my hda and it immediately was recognized by both of the Mountain Lion machines in our house, and one of them now successfully backs up to it!

I have another question though. I want to set the space limit for the backups (I have not yet tried) but from what I saw on the wiki entry page about the Amahi TM app the instructions appeared to set a default size for all TM backups on the Amahi server. I'm new to all this script based computer work, and linux in general so I need a lot of help. I will have multiple machines backing up to the server and they have very different needs. For example, my mother has a 128GB MacBook Air with very few files so I was thinking I would set her sparsebundle to max out at maybe 150 or 200GB however I have a 500GB MacBook Pro and do a lot of design and photography work so I want my sparsebundle to be probably around 1TB.

Can anybody help me with this?
Much appreciated!

Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2012 12:31 am
by schox
Thanks jwpettit!

I've been messing around in the config for the plugin, and there is as far as I know only possible to set a total limit for the "TimeCapsule", not individual for each user.

I have found some "howto's" to do this on a Apple AirPort, but I don't think that it's been done on a Amahi Timemachine - As far as I can see, the method is to create several volumes on the AirPort. - If its possible to make similar adaptation to the "Natatalk" config, I do not know, but It shuld be...

This is a method to do this on a AirPort:
http://michaelnozbe.com/mac-osx-lion-se ... capsule-wi

This is the Man page for the file /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default witch defines the volumes, permissions and volume limits
http://linux.die.net/man/5/applevolumes.default

As I have only one Mac, I've not looked too deeply into this :)

Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2012 7:52 am
by jwpettit
Right it seems obvious now, I feel silly.

Correct me if I'm wrong. The TM app for Amahi creates a share or directory or something on my Amahi which appears as a Time Capsule to a mac. Therefore it takes Time Capsule functionality working off of the concept that TM deletes old backups once it becomes full to make room for new backups. And Time Capsules are often shared between machines thus if say I have a lot of data and the other machine has less data and we both back up to the Amahi pseudo Time Capsule, and it becomes full with mostly my data and less from the other machine, but the other machine begins to require more space, then it will begin to delete more of my old backups to make room for the other machine's backups. Thus the percentage of the Amahi pseudo Time Capsule allocated to each machine changes dynamically depending on each machine's backup needs. Yes? Thus I can simply set the size to be something like 1.25 or 1.5TB and it should work just fine for both machines to back up to it?

Like I said, somebody correct me if I'm wrong (or if I ramble too much :? )

Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2012 8:46 am
by hemminger
That sounds right. When drive starts filling up it deletes the oldest backups first. From my experience on my wifes mac book air, it has 128GB drive and 40B is actually used. A months worth of backups are taking up about 22GB of time machine storage. She mostly uses it for internet browsing and her writing so not much new data is written often just modified word docs are constantly being updated as she writes more. I think you could even cut the size limit in half and still have a couple of months worth of backups. Of course if you have the storage to spare and want backups going further back in time the more storage the better.

Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2012 10:08 am
by jwpettit
Pretty much like I said in my first post, I do lots of design and photography work so the 500GB in my MB Pro is pretty much maxed out, and I would like to have a lot of headway for stuff that gets deleted so I would like about a TB or more for my backups. However madre's MB Air is pretty much the same as what you described. But I know both from previous experience and stuff I have read elsewhere, Time Machine generally requires about 1.25x your internal drive's capacity to work really well so I would like to also account for at least 1.25TB maybe 1.5 in my Amahi TM. But I know that since I do a lot more with files, my backups will fill up the space first so I want to be sure that if she starts doing more with files on her machine, it can kind of push into my old backups, re-adjust how much of that space belongs to her and how much to me. Space won't really be a concern since I plan to put about 6 TB worth of spinning metal plates into this machine.

Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2012 10:16 am
by hemminger
If your that worried i'd also suggest looking at the crashplan app for amahi. I paid $160 for 4 years worth of unlimited storage for one PC and have my macs backing up through time machine to amahi and windows PC's backing to amahi with crashplan which is free, then crashplan on my amahi server backing everything up to their online service. This way a fire in my house and I can still recover everything after I get it all replaced.

[ Post made via iPhone ] Image

Re: Timemachine backups with Amahi

Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2012 10:18 am
by schox
As the time capsule do not use Greyhole - You are limited to one disk for backups... - If you need more than 2TB backup, you are probably going to need a different solution (like a RAID system, or maybe a commercial NAS (4-6bay) with AFP support... ) - just saying before you plan for future expansion that is impossible ;)