Time Machine is nothing but a backup system built into Apple MacOS X based system. You can use Time Machine with a Time Capsule, and with USB, FireWire, and Thunderbolt disks. The disk can be directly connected to your Mac or be on a network. If a disk has partitions, you can use one of the partitions for your backup disk. This tutorial explains how to use Orange PI along with USB disk to make a time capsule for your Apple OS X based system.
From the tutorial page:
One of my projects has been to organize automated backups of the various computers in the house. This includes a couple Macs with some precious data on them. So, I decided to put my inexpensive Orange Pi with Armbian Linux to the test, with the goal of getting Time Machine working over the network to a USB drive attached to the pi board. That being the case, I discovered and successfully installed Netatalk.
Netatalk is open source software that acts as an Apple file server. With a combination of Avahi and Netatalk running, your Mac can discover your pi board on the network and will even consider it to be a “Mac” type device. This enables you to connect manually to the network drive but more importantly it enables Time Machine to find and use the remote drive. The below guidance may help if you if you wish to set up a similar backup capability for your Macs.
- Read more: Orange Pi as Time Machine Server