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Leland80's avatar
Leland80
Aspirant
Apr 14, 2014

Time Machine, multi-user, with quotas. Best solution?

The “out-of-the-box” Time Machine setup (http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/22810) is good for a single-user environment, but keep in mind that any user who can make backups, can also access anyone else’s backups!! That’s a substantial security concern, so the setup I'm using here avoids that problem.

From what I’ve found, this is the best way to setup Time Machine on a ReadyNAS in a multi-user environment:

Requirements:

Firmware 6.1.6 or greater.
OS X 10.8 or greater.
User accounts setup on the ReadyNas for each user who will use Time Machine.
You can also turn off the TimeMachine backups in FrontView if you want, it is not used in this setup.

Setup Steps

1) ssh to the NAS as root
Enable Ssh if it’s not already enabled.

2) Edit /etc/netatalk/afp.conf

Find these two lines:
 [Homes]
basedir regex = /home


And immediately after, add these three lines:

# Added these two lines to use home directory as Time Machine destination:
time machine = yes
vol size limit = 1000000 # Limits Time Machine to 1TB


3) Reboot the readyNAS (or just restart AFP if you know how to do that).

4) Connect to your home directory on the ReadyNAS via afp on your mac. (Open Finder, click "Connect As..", enter your username and password)

5) Open Time Machine's preference and configure it to the home directory as your backup disk (it will show in the available Backup Disks screen automatically).

Can you guys test this out and see if it works for you as well? Open to any suggestions here.

4 Replies

Replies have been turned off for this discussion
  • The changes you make in Step 2 (above) to /etc/netatalk/afp.conf may be wiped out if you dissable/re-enable the AFP service. You can prevent by making the file immutable:

    chattr +i /etc/netatalk/afp.conf

    ... or by simply putting the changes back in place.
  • I also had trouble when I had the vol size limit line set. With that line, the built-in time machine support and the per-user settings didn't show up on my machines. Removing that line brought them both back. I was then able to turn off the built-in time machine support.

    Is there a way to set it so that time machine is only valid for certain users? I create per-machine accounts for time machine in addition to the per-user accounts and don't need the user accounts to have time machine support. I was using this method on my Ultra 4 with 4.2.26, but the .AppleVolumes file isn't supported any more in 6.x and netatalk 3:

    http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=59974
  • Hiya...

    Just wondering if this is somehow broken in 6.1.8?

    Am trying to get it working on a Duo312, and it's not working as described, sadly, either with the volume limit set line or not.

    Has anyone else got this working with this configuration and this software version?

    Thanks,

    Rob.

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