How to Install Netatalk on Ubuntu 20.04 to use as a Time Machine Backup Server

The approach “learning every day” is challenging but attractive. The ability to test things on your home-lab is excellent, especially if you’re lucky and own a server. Otherwise, it would help if you rent somewhere in the cloud, which is not a bad idea, but in comparison price-wise, maybe it’s cheaper to get a used one. Personally own HP Proliant G8 ML350p, it’s a tower version, not rack-mount, and I can think many things in it. Recently I have bought WD Gold 10TB hard disk and installed it on my server. Now I can use it for file sharing across all my devices on the network.
Probably if you have more than one Apple computer at home, you’re an “Apple fanboy.” And most likely, you’ll get a “Time Capsule” device for your file sharing, which is unnecessary unless you have space $300 lying around and don’t want to think about configuration. I like to learn about technology, so I decided to install on my server a Netatalk, which turns about super easy installation and open source. It would be best if you had your hardware.

Installation

Assuming you’ve already installed fresh Ubuntu 20.04 focal fossa. You need to update repositories and install the Netatalk package.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y netatalk

Basicaly, that’s it. If you are on the same subnet, then on your locations in finder will appear you server name.

Just need “connect as” enter credentials of ubuntu us, and you’re good to go.

Time Machine

Most value you will get if you want to use Time Machine. You have to modify a config file as root on your Ubuntu server.

sudo nano /etc/netatalk/afp.conf

Change value to yes

[Time Machine]
    path = /home/username/backup
    time machine = yes

And restart Netatalk service.

sudo service netatalk restart

On Apple Preferences, go to Time Machine and add a network disk. It will show up in the list.

I recommend to setup a backup with an encryption.

If you’re using 18.04 or older, you won’t install via the apt repository. You have to compile by yourself.