A logical choice for this to me seemed to be to go with what I was used to, Ubuntu box with all the additional software which I needed installed via apt-get, this is something which I’ve got experience in doing and I know it works effectively. But, since there are now Mac’s involved I also thought Time Machine integration would be a nice touch, after a bit of googling around I found this tutorial. It all seemed simple enough to understand so I decided to go for it and hope for the best.

A couple of hours later I’d got it all setup, along with a DHCP server running on the Ubuntu box which makes everything run just a tad more smoothly, so, time for the first backup. Initially I couldn’t get past the “Preparing Backup” stage, it seemed that I have got too much crap on my laptop, so I thought I’d kick-start the process by excluding the “Users” folder, bringing the backup size to a more manageable 27 GB. This all worked fine after a lot of fiddling, but basically the connection kept getting interrupted for some reason, and it took forever to do the initial backup, at this point I removed the exclusion folder for the Users fold and left Time Machine to do its stuff. Though not for long, I kept getting network problems, so came to the conclusion that this simply wasn’t working.

Time to rethink?

By then I was getting somewhat annoyed, what seemed like a simple process simply wasn’t working, and why could the backup’s simply be created on any file sharing protocol which OS X supports? After all the data is stored within a “.sparsebundle” file, therefore there won’t be loss of meta data regardless of these variables (I am pretty sure about this, not 100% though).

I came to the conclusion that the best solution would be to add something there which natively supported the AFP protocol, since a new Apple computer was out of the question it seemed the next best thing would be a logical choice, I knew that the machine I had to install “Leopard” on had driver support which left much to be desired, although my conclusion was that so long as I could get the ethernet port running I was good to go. Installed this without a glitch, ticked all the right boxes and within an hour a “brand new” mac. Setting up the Time Machine drive so that It was shared over AFP was no problem, and my MacBook picked it up straight away, then after selecting through Time Machine prefpane I set it going and got a backup done over a speedy gigabit connection, so far so good, but then I started getting the same problems – every so often the connection would appear to just cut off, not allowing me to login over AFP or, well, do anything really. Since this has happened twice on the same computer I am beginning to think that maybe the problem is related to the physical port, as otherwise I’m out of ideas.

And now …

That is where I’m stuck for options; I can either use Time Machine with a standard external drive, and simple connect it up to different computers, continue trying to get to the root cause of the problem with my Server, or spend money on new hardware (Time Capsule/Mac Mini).