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I've been using FreeNAS/TrueNAS for a year or so with no issues using multiple Mac machines. It's entirely over SAMBA shares. I set the server up to give each u

I've been using FreeNAS/TrueNAS for a year or so with no issues using multiple Mac machines. It's entirely over SAMBA shares. I set the server up to give each user their own unique TM backup disk.

wil421 4y ago
What’s you pool setup for this? How much space do you set aside for each disk?
- xenadu02 4y ago
  I have it setup to share the space; I have a TM dataset (generic not AFP, Time Machine, or whatever). Then I have a SAMBA per-user Time Machine share on top of that. The first time the user connects from the Mac it creates a child dataset for that user with the relevant ACLs to keep them isolated. A quote forces each client to prune its history. The pool itself is 8x12TB Toshiba enterprise drives. I'll have to check what pool config I used but I did add multiple NVME SSDs for SLOG and ARC. Whichever one is the important one is actually mirrored across the NVME drives for redundancy while the other partition only exists on one NVME drive, which was mildly annoying to configure. I'm still not sure I made the "best" choices for the ZFS config - there are many knobs to turn.
rtp4me 4y ago
Same here. 3 Mac Laptops connected to my TrueNAS server (v13) over wifi. Each laptop has its own separate ZFS dataset. Works great. No issues thus far. That said, I have not tried to restore from TimeMachine yet. I need to try that this week.
riobard 4y ago
Interesting. Could you please share the Samba config for the Time Machine shares? And over what medium do your Mac machines connect to the NAS? Wired or wireless?
- xenadu02 4y ago
  I did not customize the Samba config, just accepted the defaults. Connections are a mix of wired and wireless. The NAS box has 10GbE to my UDMPro. See my other comment for how the datasets are setup. I forgot to mention that I applied a quota to force each client to prune its history to avoid consuming all disk space.
vanillax 4y ago
yea plus one for Truenas to do all this work.

I've been using FreeNAS/TrueNAS for a year or so with no issues using multiple Mac machines. It's entirely over SAMBA shares. I set the server up to give each user their own unique TM backup disk.

wil421 4y ago

What’s you pool setup for this? How much space do you set aside for each disk?

xenadu02 4y ago
I have it setup to share the space; I have a TM dataset (generic not AFP, Time Machine, or whatever). Then I have a SAMBA per-user Time Machine share on top of that. The first time the user connects from the Mac it creates a child dataset for that user with the relevant ACLs to keep them isolated. A quote forces each client to prune its history. The pool itself is 8x12TB Toshiba enterprise drives. I'll have to check what pool config I used but I did add multiple NVME SSDs for SLOG and ARC. Whichever one is the important one is actually mirrored across the NVME drives for redundancy while the other partition only exists on one NVME drive, which was mildly annoying to configure. I'm still not sure I made the "best" choices for the ZFS config - there are many knobs to turn.

rtp4me 4y ago

Same here. 3 Mac Laptops connected to my TrueNAS server (v13) over wifi. Each laptop has its own separate ZFS dataset. Works great. No issues thus far. That said, I have not tried to restore from TimeMachine yet. I need to try that this week.

riobard 4y ago

Interesting. Could you please share the Samba config for the Time Machine shares? And over what medium do your Mac machines connect to the NAS? Wired or wireless?

xenadu02 4y ago
I did not customize the Samba config, just accepted the defaults. Connections are a mix of wired and wireless. The NAS box has 10GbE to my UDMPro. See my other comment for how the datasets are setup. I forgot to mention that I applied a quota to force each client to prune its history to avoid consuming all disk space.

vanillax 4y ago

yea plus one for Truenas to do all this work.