Graham Christensen

How to use a NixOS Linux Server for Time Machine Backups

posted on May 10 2017

Several years ago I remember researching this process for Ubuntu, and kremalicious.com had the best instructions out there. When looking around this time, I was dismayed to find the process hasn’t seemingly improved for most Linuxes: custom compilation, fakeroots, and the like.

However, I believe NixOS provides the most succinct and reproducible instructions yet, without even having to muck with defaults write.

Incorporate the following in to your configuration.nix, nixos-rebuild switch, and you’re done:

    {
      networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [
        548 # netatalk
      ];

      services = {
        netatalk = {
          enable = true;

          volumes = {
            "grahamc-time-machine" = {
              "time machine" = "yes";
              path = "/home/grahamc/time-machine";
              "valid users" = "grahamc";
            };
          };
        };

        avahi = {
          enable = true;
          nssmdns = true;

          publish = {
            enable = true;
            userServices = true;
          };
        };
      };
    }

Tested on NixOS 17.03.


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Graham works on NixOS.