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Comment by imissmyjuno | Hacker News Reader

How's the TM backup treating you? I've set up netatalk too, and had the backup's sparsebundle get corrupted 3 times over the course of half a year leading me to abandon it. Now I just rsync to the NFS fileshare, which is less automatic.

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We have two computers. One works flawlessly, always. One used to be terrible, with backups corrupting every two or three weeks. Both was true for the Time Capsule we used at the time and the Raspberry Pi we replaced it with. I since reinstalled the second one and it works well now.

My conclusion is that Time Machine over Wifi is inherently flaky--regardless of whether the Time Machine is running on Apple hardware or not.

The program you're looking for is 'duplicity'. It even supports ssh/scp so you don't need any special software on the storage server.

For those that don't know, duplicity handles incremental backups like TimeMachine, but will also encrypt your backups using GnuPG if you choose to do so. You can also configure it to store the backups to various different types of storage, e.g ssh or Amazon S3. I wrote up how I do it here: https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...

I had the same issue and then concluded that time machine is not stable over the network. The use of the sparsebundle is basically a way of pretending that the network drive is actually a local disk and it will corrupt itself on network faults. You can probably make it work semi-reliably over a wired network but forget wifi. This is a failure of Apple's design and there's not much that can be done until they implement a sane network aware solution.

Hmm, never encountered this issue before. I've been using the TM/netatalk mechanism for at least 3 years now, and I'm still using the same sparsebundle from 3 years ago. I'm not using a raspberry pi though.

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