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Almost bought one of these, but opted for a raspi and usb3 external drive instead. Works great with Time Machine. https://saschaeggi.medium.com/use-a-raspberry-pi-4-for-time-... was my guide, though I deviated by using ext4 instead of hfs, and didn't need avahi.

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This is what I did, too.

But use ext4 instead of HFS+, and use Samba instead of Netatalk. With HFS+, the bundle would get corrupt after a few days. With Netatalk, a sudden power outage would corrupt the whole thing.

Don't listen to 99% of blog posts on this. They all tell you to use HFS+/Netatalk. None of those authors have actually used that backup solution for any extended period of time, because if they did, they'd find that it's unusable. Use this one instead:

https://mudge.name/2019/11/12/using-a-raspberry-pi-for-time-...

Samba. Ext4.

Thanks for the recommendation. We work pretty closely with Apple's SMB2 client developers to make sure everything works well together with Samba. They're great fun to work with !

Ext4 keeps all of the HFS+ metadata and resource forks?

When Time machine backs up over Samba, it creates a sparse HFS+ disk image bundle on the remote drive. File are not backed up directly to the ext4.

Good to know, thanks.

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