Time Machine support (Apple Filing Protocol)

[typo]

I think Backup Disks for Time Machine use a special protocol to communicate instead of SMB or FTP. Déjà Dup should automatically detect those disks in the network and use them with their special protocol which was designed specially for backups.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I added a task for duplicity, since if it is a new protocol, duplicity would have to speak it.

But actually as I write this, I suspect Time Machine uses not merely a special protocol, but a special file format? That would likely be not something possible to implement from a duplicity point of view.

[typo (gnomeuser8)]

It's called Apple Filing Protocol AFP and it uses DHX2 authentication. It also makes use of Zeroconf.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

So, you can use AFP today. AFP support got merged into GVFS as part of the Summer of Code 2011 [1]. You can enter an AFP URL manually into Deja Dup by choosing the "Custom Location" backup location.

But that just means that we can put duplicity volume files onto your AFP device. It doesn't mean that we can talk the same format that Time Machine does. That requires a bunch of work and likely would not involve using duplicity.

[1] http://www.advogato.org/person/gicmo/diary/49.html

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I'm going to mark this as fixed, since we've supported afp:// URIs for a long time.