I guess really a "mac client" is not what is needed so much as an option to easily provision or provide for the automatic provisioning of an SMB share. If that were the case, then Time Machine could simply perform its regular backups and point itself at the PBS, no?
That would seem a less invasive and support needy mechanism for allowing PBS to handle backing up Mac clients.
Stuart
Look, you can do that, but in my experience over the last two decades of backing up using TimeMachine, remote backups become corrupted and this is still an unresolved issue in 2024. Additionally, you will need to configure your SMBv3 very carefully if you want any support from Apple to resolve issues related to remote TimeMachine configurations [1].
At this point, some of my clients who have IT departments are forced to regularly verify backups manually for their fleets (100+ Macs) but most of them (especially those who I have decision making power in) use an open source 3rd party software. While 3rd party software may work and receive support from the communities or companies performing the backups, I do not believe they are superior to Proxmox Backup Server by most metrics- let alone the fact that they are not centrally archived under one system nor able to be synchronized off-site seamlessly. By the way, those who use TimeMachine do not "allow" their staff to store important corporate information locally on the Macintoshes because of this situation, unless they are using a 3rd party backup solution. It's sad because APFS is a great leap in technology from HFS+, so Macintoshes
should be more reliable than ever, but only having a single copy of data is the same as having 0 copies of that data in risk management as we know...
If you decide to correctly configure a VM with the required SMBv3 attributes for TimeMachine, still consider backing it up with Proxmox Backup Server, as you will ocassionally need to restore the VM's repository as TimeMachine is an unreliable backup solution- to take it a step further, many times you need to completely delete the repository and form a new backup over again because TimeMachine fails to take an old (valid) backup and combine it with an up to date snapshot of the system. I don't know why it's broken like this, but the error has been ongoing since AFP became deprecated years and years ago. Apple doesn't care about or like servers, they'd rather you pay them to use their SaaS Cloud (iCloud) for everything server related.
Put simply, TimeMachine is inferior to Proxmox Backup Server by a mile, and I hold true on the need for a MacOS client.
1.
https://developer.apple.com/library.../NetworkingInternetWeb/Time_Machine_SMB_Spec/
Tmanok