I'm relatively new to FreeNAS, though I did have some success running it with a UFS setup for a few months. I only use my box as a Time Machine backup server for two Macs. The box is a converted HP ex490 WHS and is memory limited (1 slot of DDR2, currently 2 GB, could max it out at 4 GB). The motherboard and case are proprietary so I can't upgrade them without replacing the entire setup.
With the UFS setup and 3 drives (2x1TB,1x2TB), I ran into a significant limitation. Both of the time machine sparsebundles kept growing. Last month the volume became full and both of the macs started failing their backups consistently. I couldn't figure out how to retroactively reduce and limit the size of the Time Machine sparsebundles. I was making do with external drive backups for the time being.
With ZFS, it appears that I can create datasets with limited quotas that do exactly what I want. However, I'm well short of the RAM that is recommended for ZFS. I'm not overly concerned about overall performance. In the low-memory setup, am I risking my data or just limiting my throughput? Both of the machines were able to run a backup successfully overnight, and I was able to start Time Machine on at least one of the macs?
If I'm actually risking data, I think my other choice would be to add a drive and create two mirrored setups, or maybe setup a new UFS share and modify the sparsebundles to limit their size and start anew.
Any suggestions? If it comes down to needing new hardware, I might just buy an off-the-shelf NAS, though I'd prefer to not spend that kind of money. The only other old hardware I have lying around are laptops which are even less upgradable than my WHS.
With the UFS setup and 3 drives (2x1TB,1x2TB), I ran into a significant limitation. Both of the time machine sparsebundles kept growing. Last month the volume became full and both of the macs started failing their backups consistently. I couldn't figure out how to retroactively reduce and limit the size of the Time Machine sparsebundles. I was making do with external drive backups for the time being.
With ZFS, it appears that I can create datasets with limited quotas that do exactly what I want. However, I'm well short of the RAM that is recommended for ZFS. I'm not overly concerned about overall performance. In the low-memory setup, am I risking my data or just limiting my throughput? Both of the machines were able to run a backup successfully overnight, and I was able to start Time Machine on at least one of the macs?
If I'm actually risking data, I think my other choice would be to add a drive and create two mirrored setups, or maybe setup a new UFS share and modify the sparsebundles to limit their size and start anew.
Any suggestions? If it comes down to needing new hardware, I might just buy an off-the-shelf NAS, though I'd prefer to not spend that kind of money. The only other old hardware I have lying around are laptops which are even less upgradable than my WHS.
