MacOS Mohave Time Machine with FreeNAS 11.2

[Dave Hamby]

To date, there is little written about using FreeNAS as a storage pool for MacOS Mohave APFS volume backup by Time Machine. Apple Support articles cover things to the edge of the Apple universe and FreeNAS Guide on Sharing covers creation of AFP shares of FreeNAS datasets.

Things are working as of 10.14.2 but Apple rumblings indicate that AFP is deprecated and slated for retirement in favor of CIFS sharing for Time Machine. At the moment the Mohave Time Machine preferences recognizes FreeNAS AFP but not CIFS shares. I'd like to pitch two suggestions here.

First: That the development folks keep a careful watch on the MacOS Time Machine remote storage use case.
Second: That we start a topic and maintain resources covering usage of FreeNAS storage with popular backup systems. What knowledge there is is scattered over old forum posts and is not up to date given continuing OpenZFS, FreeBSD, and FreeNAS evolution. This would be appropriate subject matter for a maintained HowTo or application guide.

 

[seanm]

Have you seen this thread:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ntal-support-for-time-machine-over-smb.70604/

and this ticket:

https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/23359

 

[dlavigne]

We have doc/code fixes coming in U2 (due out in a few weeks) due to the improved support with the bump in Samba. Even more improvements are coming in 11.3, such as the ticket @seanm mentioned. See the Roadmap for more details.

 

[Dave Hamby]

Thanks, all. Sounds like development has the issue identified and is well along implementation. Eagerly awaiting Release 11.3. 11.2 has been a wonderful UI improvement. If both protocols can be supported side by side, I'd be willing to help out as a tester of Time Machine SMB support once it is to the point where it is end user configurable on the Apple end.

 

[Dave Hamby]

This is a two part tossup however. The second part is to get a using FreeNAS with popular backup systems guide started and maintained as a community resource. This would be really helpful to the non system admin user community such as photographers and musicians who desperately need high quality backup and reliable backup media that they can maintain and expand. Most professional users have photo or track libraries too large to economically keep at an online service. And too much system customization to rely on a service that does not save and restore the system files.

 

[Constantin]

Just keep in mind that you should not allow multiple protocols to access the same share content.

So, if you have a time machine directory, only allow AFP or SMB to share that content / directory in question, not both. Ditto for any image directories, and so on.

There have been reported instances where stuff got thrashed because of conflicts between AFP and SMB being enabled for the same content. IIRC, it had to do with files being potentially open in both SMB and AFP at the same time, leading to corruption because file locks in SMB won't get passed on to AFP and vice-versa.

I am still using Sierra because AFPS still gives me the willies and SMB time machine support for FreeNAS has not been finalized yet.