Dell T20 - energy consumption too high with 25 Watt idle - around 10ish W is the goal

[flashdrive]

Yes, it was meant in context of the passive cooling suggestion in the paragraph above. Provided idleness is actually achieved, the higher power CPU getting the work done faster, will spend more time in a low power sleep state.

Honestly, this use case is covered by several other low power solutions. I don't think spinning up a NAS 24x7 is the correct one in a location where we're counting individual watts. Every WiFi router I've owned for the last 10 years has offered a USB port and the ability to share storage. I've only used it with the AFP share, but I believe Time machine can utilize a simple SMB share these days. If ZFS & RAIDz is desired, a Raspberry Pi 4 with a pair of USB drives is an easy DIY that runs around 5 watts plus drive draw.

@rvassar

I need to figure out how to limit the max usable storage size for each client's backup.

There was an option where the dmg files for TM could be created manually, and then set up to ever grow / use to a given size.

edit: https://www.imore.com/how-use-time-machine-backup-your-mac-windows-shared-folder

Scenario to avoid:

the full file space of the the storage is being utilized, and then the TM backup will do what? Clean up older backups for the respective dmg?

I was able to avoid this in TN by setting up the quota.

Another idea is partitioning with the USB storage - but then the router os wants to use a single partition for file sharing only - same as with the Airport Extreme.


edit:

hard limit of 2 TByte size for the router / external USB drive - not large enough for my scenario

also only SMB v2 support