Question about multiple time machine shares

[ronaldnutter]

I have several mac's that I would like to back up to FreeNAS using the AFP Share process.
I saw the message about not using multiple Time Machine shares and that having a single time machine share and having multiple mac's accessing it could result in another error.

What I would like to do is restrict a mac to not using more than say 500GB of disk space.
Havent been able to find an explanation of why multiple afp shares would be an issue.
I am installing a drive just for this purpose and am adding additional ram to the FreeNAS.

Suggestions on the best way to handle this ?

Thanks,
Ron

 

[anodos]

I have several mac's that I would like to back up to FreeNAS using the AFP Share process.
I saw the message about not using multiple Time Machine shares and that having a single time machine share and having multiple mac's accessing it could result in another error.

What I would like to do is restrict a mac to not using more than say 500GB of disk space.
Havent been able to find an explanation of why multiple afp shares would be an issue.
I am installing a drive just for this purpose and am adding additional ram to the FreeNAS.

Suggestions on the best way to handle this ?

Thanks,
Ron

I can't think of a reason why multiple AFP shares would be an issue, but if possible (since this sounds like a new deployment) it would be a better idea to use SMB rather than AFP for time machine for this purpose.

In 12.0-BETA1 I added a new feature where users can select template for different types of SMB shares. One of them is for an "enhanced time machine backup". What it does is the following:
- Users are presented with a single SMB share
- On first time user connects to share, a ZFS dataset is created with the username of the user who authenticated to the share, and a ZFS user quota of 1TB is applied to the dataset
- On clean disconnect samba (when a time machine backup is complete), samba automatically snapshots the dataset providing a clean point in time at which to roll back in case the backup gets corrupted by a network or power event (time machine is quite fragile).

This mostly relies on config options available for vfs_ixnas in 11.3 (see documentation), but the auto-snapshot is 12.0 only.

 

[ronaldnutter]

Thanks for the info. You are right that this is a new deployment using 11.3.
Thanks for bringing up doing time machine over SMB, I hadnt thought of looking at that.

Will look forward to 12.0.

Ron

 

[anodos]

Thanks for the info. You are right that this is a new deployment using 11.3.
Thanks for bringing up doing time machine over SMB, I hadnt thought of looking at that.

Will look forward to 12.0.

Ron

SMB is the direction that Apple is going. Although they may not drop support AFP this year or next year, it will eventually be axed.