Is it possible to set up the Channels DVR Server to use the external hard drive as a Time Machine backup?
I was looking through some tutorials for setting up a SAMBA share for Time Machine, but the entire Channels DVR Server is read-only, so it am not sure how to modify the smb.conf file to allow this.
Any guidance would be appreciated.
(I am continuing with the assumption that you are using the Raspberry Pi image.)
Can you do what you are asking? Yes, you certainly can. The OS install for that image is not read-only; you can make modifications to it that persist across reboots.
Should you do what you are asking? I would strongly recommend against it. Unless you know what you are doing, you may run into issues that could affect your DVR server running properly.
If you are truly set on doing this, I recommend moving from the RPi image to a proper computer running Linux. Then use that to run Channels and host your Samba server. (BTW, a simple search for samba time machine backup gave several relevant sites on the first page of results.)
I am just using the default Channels DVR Server image.
Following those search results required changing the smb.conf which I couldn't do because it was read-only.
How can I make modifications that persist across reboots?
You have to SSH in to the DVR server as root.
However, as I indicated, this is probably not something a novice without commandline experience should pursue. (For example, you would also likely want to shrink your recording partition and create an additional one formatted as Ext4 for your backups.)
If you really want to do this, I strongly suggest you use an actual full Linux install. If your only available computer to use is the Pi, there are myriad distros that have Pi images that are more full-featured. (The Channels Pi image is a minimal OS lacking several packages commonly found in other OSes.)
I would highly suggest against giving this task to the Raspberry Pi using the Channels DVR Server image.
Thank you for the feedback and direction.
I just have this big hard drive sitting there, not being filled as I remove recordings.
10000% agree