Do you ever wish there was a way to turn that old computer sitting in your closet into a Time Machine-enabled backup hub for your Macs? Fret no more. Using Debian 6.0 and Netatalk, you can now create your own Time Capsule for a fraction of the cost, should you have a spare machine kicking around. This may seem a little “UnApple”, but I thought it was interesting enough to pass on to you guys.
I stumbled across a tutorial by Mike Palmer that walks you through the steps of creating your own Time Capsule:
After going to the Apple Store with a friend and seeing the $300+ Apple Time Capsule I decided to see if I could do the same thing with Netatalk. Turns out I could but if you’re using Debian stable like me you need to get at netatalk 2.2.x before it’ll work with OSX Lion 10.7.x. After seeing a variety of other examples out there on the net and getting a little confused as to why they were doing certain things I decided to just post how I did it.
If you’re the Do-It-Yourself type, and you like to tinker with your hardware, give the tutorial a shot. It’s pretty straight forward. I think I’m going to do it with that old Mac mini I have kicking around in my closet.
