Note: The 1 AM - 3 AM window with no Time Machine activity is necessary to guarantee consistent state of backup data on the Raspberry Pi before sending the data to cloud. Then, the snapshot is synchronized with a remote cloud location using Rclone, a command-line program for cloud storage management. Btrfs makes this task straightforward and very fast. First, a read-only snapshot of backup data is created thanks to backup volume residing on top of Btrfs - one of Copy-on-Write file systems available on modern Linux OSs. That is accomplished via a scheduled cron job and consists of two steps. The Raspberry Pi syncs its local backup data to cloud nightly at 2 AM. The Time Machine backups are assumed to be created encrypted so that there is no need to deal with encryption on the Raspberry Pi end or in cloud.īelow is a high-level diagram of what we are building including components and data flow: You are not afraid of working with Terminal and comfortable with the command line.

Since we are talking about Time Machine, there should be a macOS computer in your possession with a working SSH client. That is a fancy way to say you need a proper USB cable. I assume you have a way to connect the external hard drive to the host Raspberry Pi. A spinning HDD is preferred since today majority of Macs ship equipped with SSDs, and 3-2-1 backup strategy advises using at least two different media to eliminate data loss due to similar reasons. You also will need an external hard drive. I recommend Raspberry Pi 4 for improved USB and Ethernet IO performance compared to the previous generations. I assume you have functioning Raspberry Pi hardware. Below are a few things to get out of the way before proceeding:

Time machine backblaze