Backup and Cloud

[Tha Professor]

Hello, MacRumors!

I've never been good in backing up. Up until now there wasn't much I really needed that safe on my home computer, but things change. We have a lot of photos on our main computer (MBP). I have decided to build a NAS using Raspberry Pi and an old drive (I am on budget). Since I am not that thorough and I was planning on using Time Machine so I don't have to think about making the backups.

But since I will already have a Pi and we have a really good uplink connection I thought about making my own cloud, so we could access the photos from anywhere on an iPad and also avoid using Flickr or another service for sharing with friends and family. I've heard good things about OwnCloud, so I planned on using that

However I am really confused what would happen if I started to mix backups with remote access. I guess I could just share the Time Machine partition on WAN and read the files, but wouldn't uploading a new file into the same space make a mess out of the backup?

Is there any backup solution that would be as easy to maintain as Time Machine, but would also allow me to make it available in my Pi Cloud? I would like to avoid doing everything twice - keeping a backup and moving files onto the Pi for cloud access

Thanks for any ideas!

PS: I don't really care about whole bootable snapshots. It is the individual files that matter.

 

[Weaselboy]

I don't believe you will be able to use the Pi for Time Machine since that requires a system on the Pi that supports the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) network standard.

But you should be able to attach and external drive to the Pi and have it viewable from the Mac in Finder. If you can accomplish that, you could use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to automate copying (cloning) your data to the Pi drive then share the drive with users on the network. If you set that up so it is read only, you should be okay.

Like you said, this is not ideal as it is best to have backups just for backups, but it would work for you given your limited resources.

 

[Dark Dragoon]

I don't believe you will be able to use the Pi for Time Machine since that requires a system on the Pi that supports the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) network standard.

Netatalk runs fine on a Raspberry Pi running Linux which provides AFP with Time Machine support.

I've never been good in backing up. Up until now there wasn't much I really needed that safe on my home computer, but things change. We have a lot of photos on our main computer (MBP). I have decided to build a NAS using Raspberry Pi and an old drive (I am on budget). Since I am not that thorough and I was planning on using Time Machine so I don't have to think about making the backups.

Be aware that the Raspberry Pi essentially only has one USB2 connection which is shared between the USB ports and ethernet connection via a built in hub. So if you try to copy files to a drive over a network to some USB attached storage don't expect it to be fast.

For this reason I would expect backing up using it to be a very slow process. It isn't something I've tried though, I just share space on the SD card using Netatalk.

But since I will already have a Pi and we have a really good uplink connection I thought about making my own cloud, so we could access the photos from anywhere on an iPad and also avoid using Flickr or another service for sharing with friends and family. I've heard good things about OwnCloud, so I planned on using that

That should work fine.

However I am really confused what would happen if I started to mix backups with remote access. I guess I could just share the Time Machine partition on WAN and read the files, but wouldn't uploading a new file into the same space make a mess out of the backup?

You would keep the files in ownCloud or whatever other method you use to make them available, separate from your backups.

However just remember not to only store your files on the same drive as the backup, if it fails you lose everything.

Is there any backup solution that would be as easy to maintain as Time Machine, but would also allow me to make it available in my Pi Cloud? I would like to avoid doing everything twice - keeping a backup and moving files onto the Pi for cloud access

Not that I'm aware of. It is something that would probably be best avoided though as you could easily mess up your backups.

 

[Weaselboy]

Netatalk runs fine on a Raspberry Pi running Linux which provides AFP with Time Machine support.

Ah... did not know that. Look like this would work out fine then.

 

[Tha Professor]

You would keep the files in ownCloud or whatever other method you use to make them available, separate from your backups.

Thank you for your thorough answers! It seems this will be the best way. The photos from the Time Machine backup will be shared on WAN for read only and another partition will be used for the owncloud documents.

I will have two copies of my mac (mac and Pime Machine) and two copies of the cloud (the Pi and synced again to my mac). The copy of the cloud will be excluded from the Time Machine backup, since it would be duplicated on the same physical drive, which is useless.