Spare parts, but no spare time but i puttered away at this anyways. So there are a couple kinks to work out, but I wanted something remote for my Time Machine so it could work on the hour every hour in the background. My wireless on my Apple Extreme went but the main router is still in action. So what now? I need somewhere to plug an external USB drive into. So due to Covid19 – like many people I snapped and cleaned my office drawers and dusted off an old Rasperry PI 3 B+. Hey – I could try that cause my time machine perpetually says preparing backup and all the online help doesn’t work.

I had a spare drive (not sure why) so I cobbled the whole thing together and after > 24 hours of it backing up – I think it works. Here are links and quick tips to keep it going

Aside: What surprises me most is now many GB change and get time-machined each time hard drive from doing nothing except a little surfing on the web. Mental.

Ok – first lets start with the tips once it is all going. Why first? Cause I need them the most

Raspberry PI in emergency mode – an pressing continue does nothing

• in my case my mounting of my external drive in fstab didn’t have nofail as an option and when it wasn’t plugged in the whole PI went sideways. After a power fail – this is likely to happen so lets fix it
• While booting – when the PI says “press shift for recovery” do that – i figured this out – but these guys have another way and inspired me and showed me that I am not alone in my plight.
• then (e) for editing the files, add _space_ init=/bin/sh to the end commandline.txt ON THE SAME LINE (_space_ means press the spacebar)
• then using tab – tab until you highlight the OK button
• then (esc) button to reboot
• no – the PI main drive (not time machine) will be in read mode so remount using
  • ls /dev (to see if the dir name is correct compared to the article)
  • mount -o remount,rw /dev/mmcblk0p2 /
  • sudo nano /etc/fstab
  • make your changes (I had to make defaults,nofail as the options)
    • UUID="xxxxxxxx" auto defaults,nofail 0 0
  • ctrl-x Y
  • sudo mount -a to test your fstab RIGHT NOW without a million painful reboots and waiting
  • press ctrl-alt-delete and the PI reboots (there is no reboot command I could find).

Now go to get your PI going?

• DO NOT TRY hfs+ encrypted – JUST DONT it does NOT work as the encryption is proprietary to Apple and keeps me safe from hackers. Plus you find out after you have banged your head on the desk many times
  • you can still encrypt the backup – just not the partition using hfs+
• Start here
• Just format the drive as exfat and get going like this article tells you
• fstab – see above advice
• change the default users password
• lock down permissions
• boom done

P.S. I wish I had a RPI 4 – it looks like it would be faster w. USB3.0 – but if I bought one – I wouldn’t be using up my surplus crap in my desk drawers that would otherwise be collecting dust.