OSX backups to a samba share

I’ve been using a USB disk in an external case to make TimeMachine backups of my wife’s Macbook. This approach worked for quite some time but was quite fiddly: take the disk out of the closet, find a power plug for the external case, attach cables etc. My wife would never do backups herself - the whole procedure was just too many steps.

In OSX native land, there’s this time capsule thingy that allows to do backups over WLAN. The approach itself looks what I (and my wife) want. However, I don’t want to set up yet another device that eats power and does nothing but backups for a single MacBook.

The web is full of HOWTOs that describe the setup of Time Machine backups to a Linux server via netatalk. However, I don’t want to run yet another stoftware stack on my Linux home server just for backups for the MacBook.

Then I found one blog post that describes the setup for making backups to Samba (this is in german, though …). This is exactly what I want: I’m running Samba for sharing Music etc. in the local network anyway.

Now I feel safe again. My wife’s MacBook does backups whenever the laptop is active and I don’t have to run additional services.