DroboShare + Netatalk + Time Machine
At work, we’re mostly a Mac shop. To ease our backup procedure (currently, passing around an external HD), we recently got a Drobo (external RAID-like HD enclosure) and a DroboShare (a NAS). The intention was to use it as a Time Capsule replacement, so that those of us running Mac OS X 10.5 would have our files backed up automatically through Time Machine. Unfortunately, there was some confusion: the Drobo supports Time Machine (since it’s just an external drive); the DroboShare does not. This revelation came only after we opened the boxes, and meant that the system was far less of an upgrade than we had thought.
That is, until one of my coworkers ran across this blog post: TimeMachine via AFP (netatalk) to a DroboShare. The author managed to compile netatalk for the DroboShare so that it can be used for Time Machine backups. The directions are pretty good. The only issue I ran into is that the directory structure is hard-coded into the startup script, which was easily fixed by logging in using Dropbear SSH and creating a symbolic link from /mnt/DroboShares/Drobo to my actual share name:
ln -s /mnt/DroboShares/MyDroboShare /mnt/DroboShares/Drobo
Following the rest of the directions worked perfectly.
w00t.
Edit (2008-12-14): The Google Code site has moved and is now called BackMyFruitUp.