Complete Hacker Tutorial to getting Time Machine over NFS to work.

Personally I don't much care for SMB... but I've implemented it as well for our Windows boxes to backup over.

Various samba versions have been implicated in backups that are corrupt when when you go to read them. There are enough people successfully using samba now for time capsule that I suspect that issue is a thing of the past or restricted to certain NAS devices.

Time Machine is a big enough bandwidth user that I presume we are talking LAN, and for many people their LAN is secure enough.

~@

I assume everyones situation is different, I wouldn't be attempting to use TimeCode on a couple TB drives of a MacPro tower.

All their documents are also in their Dropbox folder, but they have too many photos to make that practical for all their data.

All of this works without them ever having to do anything, they don’t even have to understand what’s happening. It’s perfect.

[0] I actually gifted them my old 250GB external HDD a year ago but it broke a few months ago, so I bought them a new 1TB HDD. The new 1TB drive actually also houses my offsite backup. It’s very infrequently updated (and I don’t use Time Machine, I drag over files I think are important) but better than nothing.

Yeah, it just delays and retries occasionally until it's able to mount it.

I personally find it is fine to backup my macbook pro (1TB drive) over wifi to my Debian server. The first backup takes multiple days though. After that (when it works[1]) the backups take about 5 to 15 minutes depending on how much changed.

[1] I've been having tons of trouble with it the last few months where it takes forever and constantly gets errors while backing up random files. When tries again it gets further and further until it eventually finishes. But instead of getting backups every hour I get a backup finishing once a week or so. I switched from netatalk to samba on the server but I still get the same errors (so I don't think it's a transport layer issue). I know plenty of other people who back up just fine and I believe my issue isn't widespread.

I just forced an incremental back up and it took about 120 seconds. (Not much to push, it was only 20 minutes from last automatic one.)

If you don't spend time on the network with the backup device it isn't invisible. The backups get larger and take more time. I can see you'd have trouble if you primarily used your computer away from home, but backed up at home and only used it for a few minutes a day at home.

You could say that again. I bet you don't do any backups at all. Time machine has two options. The first is the location to backup and the second is directories to exclude. Ignoring cache files is one click away...

I used to have all sorts of different backup systems and even hacked my own backup system on top of time machine like in this article, but at the end of the day went out and picked up a Time Machine. It just works. Backups silently in the background and I can recover when needed. I nearly always backup over wifi and never feel it "thrashing disks" or using all my network speed. The hd's that ship with Time Machine are also pre-tested for quality so are not the cheapo hd of the week. Time Machine is also a wiki box, printer, and gig switch.