I need a NAS for TimeMachine

Apple’s backup TimeMachine is the backup solution offered for every Mac owner, if he did not got stuck with Tiger ;)

Plug an external disk and here you go, you can backup your Mac on it. Great! Easy! Nice!

What if I want to backup elsewhere than on an attached external disk drive ? Lets say on a storage available on my LAN ? Yes, on a NAS. In that case I need a NAS to be TimeMachine ready, yes the NAS has to be recognized by TimeMachine in order to use it as a disk target. Easy solution, buy a TimeCapsule of course :D You see, it’s easy, Apple thought of everything.

No seriously, I don’t need an extra router with switch and wireless access point, just a NAS to do my backup ;)

Why not buying a NAS already bundled with disks, like Synology, ReadyNAS or QNap ? Come on, let’s spend money again :D Do I have the money ? Are they reliable ? How many disks ? Can I expand the storage size ?

Hey, what about recycling an old PC exhausts by a lifetime running Windows XP (and its hundreds of patches). Maybe this old PC deserves a second chance and retire as a File Server ;)

Ok, what do I do with my naked PC ? I need a NAS solution, but a lightweight OS and software solution. First thing that came to my mind is Linux (don’t tell me you thought of installing windows again, please be nice with the machine)

Let’s go for Linux then. Ho wait, I’ve also heard of ZFS. Could ZFS be useful for me ?

Let’s find a Linux based solution. Let’s do some search …. Ok here is the result of my search: openfiler, naslite, nas4free

These 3 came up regularly in forums and posts.

After more readings I would go with NAS4Free. Original open source project was filed under FreeNAS but as it became more commercial, the team split and the non-commercial branch continued under NAS4Free. NAS4Free is based on FreeBSD.

Please check nas4free.org web site for more info.

How to install NAS4Free: I’ll do a post for that.