You would think that you could use your FreeBSD server as a file server to host your backups. It’s not as easy as I thought it would be for my laptop working over a wireless network.
I actually use Retrospect for my backups, but I found that as my data got bigger, reliable backups were becoming more cumbersome to maintain.
At work I use a Drobo drive and TimeMachine. It works great, but I have plenty of hard drive space on my FreeBSD servers; why not use them for my backups?
TimeMachine off the bat does not work with network hosted shared. However, I did find a lot of websites that show you how to pair TimeMachine with a network share. The best instructional site I found was here!
The only other thing I had to do was to watch the network volume for the name of the sparsebundle that was created. The name I used was incorrect.
Also, if you add additional volumes to your backup, you may have to increase your sparsebundle. I had to create another sparsebundle image that was large enough to contain my backups, which seems like something the Disk Utility could do, but doesn’t. According to posts I have read, this may be a bug in the software.