I spent a lot of time working on this. Basically, nope. I ended up with a virtual ubuntu box running netatalk (on hyper-v), but the share was still AFP. Scaled nicely with users, worked with quotas and AD. I've been told later version of time machine can use SMB shares (i did this 3 years ago) but haven't tested it myself. Reliability is the key. I've had marginal successes with SMB 3.0, but lots of failures where the entire backup needed to be redone. every month. which defeats the purpose of time machine, which is to allow time travel.
You can pickup an old xServe and xRAID pretty cheap used on eBay. The ability to make them a network time machine is built in.
It's also built into almost any NAS nowadays. Not to mention you can hook up drives to manyrouters that will also work.
Thinking most folks won't want to run a loud Xserve at their house...or in general. If you really want to go the macOS route, you could just get a mini and install Server. But if you really want to homelab it up with a 1U server...cool.
macOS by default uses SMB. Also, any Mac can now be the destination for time machine. I haven't tested this out, but that leaves me to believe that time machine works well with SMB, yes.
FreeNAS (or similar) to create a TimeMachine compatible share.
Synology Time Machine is more stable than Apple Server Time Machine ever was.
Though I find that afp actually works better than SMB.
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I spent a lot of time working on this. Basically, nope. I ended up with a virtual ubuntu box running netatalk (on hyper-v), but the share was still AFP. Scaled nicely with users, worked with quotas and AD. I've been told later version of time machine can use SMB shares (i did this 3 years ago) but haven't tested it myself. Reliability is the key. I've had marginal successes with SMB 3.0, but lots of failures where the entire backup needed to be redone. every month. which defeats the purpose of time machine, which is to allow time travel.
You can pickup an old xServe and xRAID pretty cheap used on eBay. The ability to make them a network time machine is built in.
It's also built into almost any NAS nowadays. Not to mention you can hook up drives to many routers that will also work.
Thinking most folks won't want to run a loud Xserve at their house...or in general. If you really want to go the macOS route, you could just get a mini and install Server. But if you really want to homelab it up with a 1U server...cool.
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That is an out-of-date kludge.
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macOS by default uses SMB. Also, any Mac can now be the destination for time machine. I haven't tested this out, but that leaves me to believe that time machine works well with SMB, yes.
FreeNAS (or similar) to create a TimeMachine compatible share.
Mount an image on the share, like yobilltechno suggested (https://www.reddit.com/r/macsysadmin/comments/a35rsc/backing_up_macos_via_time_machine_to_a_network/eb3lzgn/)
Use rsync to sync to the share (create a script that mounts the share before the sync) https://github.com/laurent22/rsync-time-backup
Use 2 external drives and swap them out every week