Leopard Time Machine Backups To an Samba SMB Share

The short answer is to look here for the instructions that finally made it all work for me. After a little “mishap” with my addressbook a few days ago (helpfully synced, empty to the net and to my phone, so nowhere had a backup) I finally figured that checking out the much touted “Time Machine” backup software from apple probably would be a good idea.

Course, being that I use my laptop 99% of the time on my lap on the couch, having a external hard drive connected would kinda suck. Also I’m not paying the apple tax to get the Time Capsule hardware when I have a plethora of unused external disks here.

So what I did:

• First step was get one, plug a 500G disk into my linux workstation.
  
• Format it as ext3 and mount it in a safe place
  
  
  
  • Find the disk’s UUID
    
  • Put it in /etc/fstab
    
  
  
• Make it a share in Samba
  
• Mount it under leopard and make sure it automounts.
  
• Follow the instructions here to tell Leopard to allow unsupported mounts (the defaults write… command) and test.
  
• In my case it failed, and I got the “backup disk could not be created” error, so I followed the rest of the instructions to create the sparse image and copy it to the samba share.
  
• Test again, correct typeos.
  
• Run the Time Machine config to select the share. Wait for the long ‘processing’ to finish.
  
• Success!
  
• Run backup.