OSX Migration

[Dismayed]

I currently have a mid-2010 Mac Pro (cheese grater) that is configured to dual boot OSX and Windows 10. I'm using OpenZFS on OSX, and I have a 4 disk pool that I use to store family photos and such. The ZFS pool isn't available when I boot to Windows, of course. And Apple is no longer supporting OS upgrades on my machine (Windows offers better support for legacy hardware, it seems). So I'm planning to move my 4-drive ZPool into a NAS, and then I'll convert my Mac Pro to a Windows-only book.

Does this seem reasonable? My other alternative would be Windows and ReFS, but that seems the less desirable route.

 

[seanm]

Sounds reasonable. I haven't tried exactly what you're talking about, but I did successfully take a ZFS disk from my FreeNAS and insert it into my cheese grater, and it was readable.

 

[anodos]

You should use "xattr -l" on the Mac to determine whether you have MacOS metadata on your filesystem that you'd like to preserve. ZFS on OSX writes MacOS xattrs into what will appear as the "user" xattr namespace in FreeBSD. So the data will be visible, but unfortunately, MacOS over SMB writes its xattrs as alternate data streams (streams). Samba internally prefixes streams with "DosStream." to keep them separate from OS/2 xattrs. Additionally, some xattrs (finderinfo) are named differently when they're on SMB shares as streams (afpinfo iirc). This is related to Services for Mac (SFM). This means that part of the data migration may need to involve scripting "mvxattr" operations to rename the xattrs and give them the correct (per samba) prefix, and change finderinfo and resource forks to the correct name over SMB. Once you have done this, you will need to _only_ share the data over SMB (otherwise you risk stripping metadata). An example of metadata that would be stripped are MacOS color tags.