written July 2019
I recently followed some tutorials on the web about setting up Netatalk to mimic an Apple Time Capsule. I found most of the tutorials outdated and confusing. So I decided to document my own process here for you!
Of course, you'll want an external hard drive or SSD connected to your Pi via USB. You can format your drive in any way you like--it doesn't need to be Apple HFS+ formatted. Ext 4 works just fine.
Add an entry to your /etc/fstab as usual, and be sure to add the user_xattr, acl, and nofail options, like this:
PARTUUID=10f6be6e-25f4-4118-aee7-f4a913701bb8 /mnt/drive1 ext4 defaults,user_xattr,acl,noatime,nofail 0 1
You can get the PARTUUID for your drive and partition from the blkid command.
Make sure the directory exists. Then mount the drive with sudo mount -a.
sudo apt install netatalk
Create a file in the home directory of your pi user called AppleVolumes, e.g. /home/pi/AppleVolumes. In the file, add a single line for your drive, like this:
/mnt/drive1 "Time Machine Drive 1" options:tm
Lastly, restart netatalk: sudo systemctl restart netatalk
That's it! Now you can access the drive from any Mac on your network after logging in as the pi user. You can set the drive as a target for Time Machine too!
Hosting for this site is provided by
The SDF Public Access UNIX System