Time capsule substitute

[Pandamonium]

Most of the information I've been able to dig up about time machine and time capsule is one or more years old, and it cites Apple disabling Time Machine over samba shares. (or something along those lines). Anyway, I'm looking for updated first-hand experiences about using Time Machine on network shares. Does it work properly? Have you been able to do a full restore without issue? Does the drive need to be apple's journaled filesystem or can it work with NTFS shares?

I've got one PC laptop and one Macbook; I'd like both backed up to the same physical device. And I want the physical device to have a RAID1, so the Time Capsule is out. Cheap-ish is good, but I'm willing to pay a bit more if it'll be seamless. HP MediaSmarts look tempting, but I would like VGA out so that I could repurpose the machine in the future.

 

[Circlenaut]

Check out FreeNAS and this guide. It's pretty much the easiest/cheapest option out there. Personally I moved away from FreeNAS because ZFS support in FreeBSD 0.7 is still experimental and they're taking forever getting FreeNAS 0.8 out. I re-installed nexentastor on my home server (which lacks AFP support and an easy time machine setup like FreeNAS but has a much more updated ZFS version) and got a time capsule (which backups to another external HD connected to it). Frankly when it comes to backing up critical data I'm more inclined towards using a recommended approach though when I did use FreeNAS it never failed during restore. You're miles will vary.

 

[Goosemaster]

+1 for FreeNAS - It's always been fantastic.

 

[Ka0t1x]

Or if you want a more fully functional nix box as a server:
http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/

I've always used that guide because I can never remember how to setup AFP.

 

[Emulex]

cisco nss 322/324/326 (aka qnap)
hp windows home servers

if you want something that just works out of the box.