Migrating time-machine from AFP to SAMBA

General
3

Thank you immensely for your words, they’re extremely motivating and encouraging!

I wish I could have done more testing on this feature to give you more information but as @phillxnet explained, it was unfortunately not possible for me to get access to recent Apple hardware and couldn’t really get some just for that. That’s why your prompt offer is wonderful news and very motivating!

Now as to your questions: I completely agree with what @phillxnet has said and I would disable AFP before trying to use Samba for your timemachine. This is because I’ve seen several reports of people running into compatibility with Netatalk, and given it is not supported anymore, these problems unfortunately are not likely to get fixed.

Here’s what I would thus do:

  1. Go to System > Groups and create a new group dedicated for a new user: let’s call that group macosusers for instance.
  2. Go to System > Users and create a new user and choose the group created above for its group membership. I’m not sure whether this is necessary given you may already have a dedicated group and user from your AFP setup, but that might be something to keep in mind in case of problem.
  3. Create a new share.
  4. Edit access to this share and set the user in step 2 as owner, and also give read/write/exec access to the group level (these steps are similar to what is already described for AFP in our documentation, by the way).
  5. Make sure the Samba service is turned ON. If not, configure it and turn it ON from Rockstor webUI.
  6. Go to Storage > Samba, and create a new Samba export.
  7. In this dialog, select the share you just create for your Time Machine backup in step 3 above, and set the user mentioned in step 2 as admin.
  8. Make sure to check the checkbox for “Is this export for Time Machine?”.
  9. Leave everything else with default values and then submit to create the export.
  10. From your Mac, you should be able to see and select this share in the list of available Disks in the Time Machine preferences. If not, you may need to connect to this server first, either by selecting it in the sidebar of Finder (and select “Connect as” using the credentials for the user you created in step 2 above), or “Go > Connect to server” and then entering smb://rockstorIP/share_name. Once you’ve done this, the share should appear in the list of Disks for Time Machine. This is the same as for your AFP setup as was described in our documentation: http://rockstor.com/docs/samba_ops.html#from-a-mac

Again, I agree with @phillxnet’s recommendation of setting a separate share for that at first to make sure everything works fine so that you don’t risk your existing Time Machine backups.

I hope this helps, or at least will guide you towards what’s needed to get it working just the way you need and want.

Oh, and would it be possible to let us know your mac OS version for reference?

Thanks again!

1 Like