This is a recipe that I used a long time ago on I think a raspberry pi that had a 3 TB disk attached to it. I have a MacBook pro and when it is connected to a power supply it does the backup even when it is closed. It worked for months until the hard drive died.

I should say that I have not tested this with Mavericks, but I can not think of changes that should prevent this from working. Restore worked fine even though I experienced that big partial restores sometimes seem to fail but this is not a peculiarity of the debian style time capsule. I had a time machine backup once just on a disk and a script that I wrote that had a variable like so test=/${bla} and rm -rf ${test} - CAN YOU GUESS - started deleting my root tree. Yes I am an idiot, but I learn from my mistakes. That is more than some people can say. Anyway, the restore of this did not work, it crashed somewhere and I restored important data by hand. But this was a time machine issue, it had nothing to do with debian.

I took it from:

http://routerjockey.com/2009/08/28/setting-up-apple-filing-protocol-and-bonjour-under-debian/

apt-get build-dep netatalk
apt-get install libcrack2-dev fakeroot libssl-dev
apt-get source netatalk

cd netatalk-2.2.2/
dch -v 2.2.2-2+SSL (enter ctrl+x y and enter)

DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=ssl dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

cd ..
dpkg -i netatalk_2.2.2-2+SSL_i386.deb
aptitude hold netatalk


vi /etc/default/netatalk

    ATALKD_RUN=no
    PAPD_RUN=no
    CNID_METAD_RUN=yes
    AFPD_RUN=yes
    TIMELORD_RUN=no
    A2BOOT_RUN=no

vi /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf

add line at bottom:
- -tcp -noddp -uamlist uams_dhx_passwd.so,uams_dhx2_passwd.so

This was the old line that caused unsupported server problem:
- -transall -uamlist uams_randnum.so,uams_dhx.so -nosavepassword -advertise_ssh


vi /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default

at the bottom add:
~/                 "Home Directory"   "$u"        cnidscheme:cdb
/data/music        mp3                allow:chris
3## This line is different from the tutorial in the link, as it did not work     without the tm option
/data/timemachine  TimeMachine        allow:chris cnidscheme:cdb  options:usedots,upriv,tm

I got the error on the Macbook: Something wrong with the volume's CNID DB, using temporary CNID DB instead.Check server messages for details!

After changing cnidscheme:cdb to cnidscheme:dbd the error went away.

/etc/init.d/netatalk restart

apt-get install avahi-daemon
apt-get install libnss-mdns

vi /etc/nsswitch.conf

hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 mdns

vi /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service

This file should contain:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
 <!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
 <service-group>
 <name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
 <service>
     <type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
     <port>548</port>
 </service>
 <service>
     <type>_device-info._tcp</type>
     <port>0</port>
     <txt-record>model=Xserve</txt-record>
 </service>
</service-group>


/etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart

chown -R chris:chris /data/timemachine/
chown -R chris:chris /data/music

This worked for me and as soon as I have bought a Raid something I will redo the setup with my raspberry as it is the ideal compromise between performance and energy usage.