7 ms·

I have a small NAS4Free box at home with ZFS and automatic zpool scrubbing. Barring a physical disaster (fire, flood, etc), I expect my data to be safe indefini

I have a small NAS4Free box at home with ZFS and automatic zpool scrubbing. Barring a physical disaster (fire, flood, etc), I expect my data to be safe indefinitely. It was pretty easy to set it up on an HP Microserver, I recommend it.

scrumper 13y ago
I have a Drobo in my Amazon cart, was about to pull the trigger until I read this article. Do you know if your NAS4Free solution a viable solution for a household full of Macs that need a shared Time Machine destination? I'm tempted: it's cheaper, and NAS4Free will keep evolving.
- minikites 13y ago
  Unfortunately, I have no idea about Time Machine, the one Mac I have is running 10.4 (pre Time Machine). SMB, SSH/SFTP (even set up key-based auth), regular FTP all work great. Transmission works great and has a decent web interface. UPS support seems to be okay, haven't really tested it. DLNA/UPnP (fuppes) crashes all the time and I only tried it with the very buggy VLC for iOS, so I'm not sure how stable it actually is.
  - scrumper 13y ago
    OK thanks - you've set me on a big research path here, and hopefully saved me some money (and a few bits).
- mynegation 13y ago
  Anything that can run Samba server can be a target for Time Machine backup, google DIY Time Machine. I considered FreeNAS but figured it would be too much time to ste up and went with the Synology Intel box instead, could not be happier with it. Synology has step-by-step instructions for setting it up as a Time Machine backup target.
  - dmd 13y ago
    Be warned that network-based TM is extremely unreliable. (Just google time machine synology failure).
    - sitkack 13y ago
      I dumped time machine entirely for an rsync based solution. Take a look @ `--link-dest`
- ellisd 13y ago
  I recently moved back to FreeNAS after iXsystems took over the project. FreeNAS includes Time Machine support: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Apple_%28AFP%29_Shares#Using_Time_Machine http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Apple_%28AFP%29_Shares#Usin...
- axman6 13y ago
  I run FreeBSD on a microserver with 4x3TB in raidz1, and it was simple enough to set up, and NAS4Free is even easier. I believe it's supported time machine for a long time, though it'll be the annoying disk image based time machine (same as used on the time capsule). It'd be really nice if there was a nice way to do timemachine backups and use ZFS's snapshots. I'd love to see rsync with this ability without needing to write a script to form the snapshot after the sync.
- Khaine 13y ago
  I don't know much about NAS4Free, but if it can install netatalk, then you can do time machine easily
anon4 13y ago
Doesn't the lack of an fsck tool for ZFS worry you? I know it's supposed to never ever get corrupted, but HDDs do lie sometimes, bits get flipped other times and knowing there's nothing that can try to discover lost files is a deal-breaker for me. Also, from what I remember, due to the fact ZFS keeps previous versions of files around, the effective data capacity you get is something like 1/2 or even 1/3 of the capacity of the HDD, no?
- bensummers 13y ago
  Flipped bits will be detected and corrected if you're running at least a mirror, which you should be. This is one of the main reasons you should use ZFS for data you want to keep, and one of the reasons why it's so much better than traditional RAID. You can create snapshots of FS to keep old versions, but how many, and therefore how much space is used, is up to you.
- minikites 13y ago
  Answering as a novice: The whole point of ZFS is that if a bit gets flipped, it's corrected the next time the file is accessed. There's a scrub command that manually hits every file to check for integrity and you can schedule it through cron. And I assume you can control the size of the snapshots, I haven't looked into it but it would be pretty silly if you couldn't. I have four 3TB drives in RAID-Z and I have 9TB to play with, same as RAID-5.
- patrickg_zill 13y ago
  The command "zpool scrub POOLNAME" will go through and check all the checksums for you, and, you should use either RAID1 or RAIDZ (similar to RAID5) so that if it does detect an error, then the other copy of the data can be used to correct it. For snapshots - they only get made, if you make them (or setup an automated script that makes them). You can list the snapshots and see how much space each uses, as well.
- axman6 13y ago
  You seem pretty uninformed about ZFS so I'll try and help. As other have mentioned, there's the zpool scrub command which checks the integrity of the drive. Also, I'm not sure where you got the "ZFS keeps previous versions of files around" idea from, it only does that if you make a snapshot, and only modifications of the file cause the file to be copied; this is waht copy on write is. It means you can have the whole history of your file system with almost no space overhead except for changes. Apple's time Machine does the same thing, but in a different way: each directory that hasn't been changed since the last backup is hard linked to the previous backup's version (which might itself be a hardlink). this makes is quite space efficient (and a pretty easy to understand hack to get versioning on a file system that doesn't natively support snapshots)

scrumper 13y ago

I have a Drobo in my Amazon cart, was about to pull the trigger until I read this article. Do you know if your NAS4Free solution a viable solution for a household full of Macs that need a shared Time Machine destination? I'm tempted: it's cheaper, and NAS4Free will keep evolving.

minikites 13y ago
Unfortunately, I have no idea about Time Machine, the one Mac I have is running 10.4 (pre Time Machine). SMB, SSH/SFTP (even set up key-based auth), regular FTP all work great. Transmission works great and has a decent web interface. UPS support seems to be okay, haven't really tested it. DLNA/UPnP (fuppes) crashes all the time and I only tried it with the very buggy VLC for iOS, so I'm not sure how stable it actually is.
- scrumper 13y ago
  OK thanks - you've set me on a big research path here, and hopefully saved me some money (and a few bits).
mynegation 13y ago
Anything that can run Samba server can be a target for Time Machine backup, google DIY Time Machine. I considered FreeNAS but figured it would be too much time to ste up and went with the Synology Intel box instead, could not be happier with it. Synology has step-by-step instructions for setting it up as a Time Machine backup target.
- dmd 13y ago
  Be warned that network-based TM is extremely unreliable. (Just google time machine synology failure).
  - sitkack 13y ago
    I dumped time machine entirely for an rsync based solution. Take a look @ `--link-dest`
ellisd 13y ago
I recently moved back to FreeNAS after iXsystems took over the project. FreeNAS includes Time Machine support: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Apple_%28AFP%29_Shares#Using_Time_Machine http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Apple_%28AFP%29_Shares#Usin...
axman6 13y ago
I run FreeBSD on a microserver with 4x3TB in raidz1, and it was simple enough to set up, and NAS4Free is even easier. I believe it's supported time machine for a long time, though it'll be the annoying disk image based time machine (same as used on the time capsule). It'd be really nice if there was a nice way to do timemachine backups and use ZFS's snapshots. I'd love to see rsync with this ability without needing to write a script to form the snapshot after the sync.
Khaine 13y ago
I don't know much about NAS4Free, but if it can install netatalk, then you can do time machine easily

anon4 13y ago

Doesn't the lack of an fsck tool for ZFS worry you? I know it's supposed to never ever get corrupted, but HDDs do lie sometimes, bits get flipped other times and knowing there's nothing that can try to discover lost files is a deal-breaker for me. Also, from what I remember, due to the fact ZFS keeps previous versions of files around, the effective data capacity you get is something like 1/2 or even 1/3 of the capacity of the HDD, no?

bensummers 13y ago
Flipped bits will be detected and corrected if you're running at least a mirror, which you should be. This is one of the main reasons you should use ZFS for data you want to keep, and one of the reasons why it's so much better than traditional RAID. You can create snapshots of FS to keep old versions, but how many, and therefore how much space is used, is up to you.
minikites 13y ago
Answering as a novice: The whole point of ZFS is that if a bit gets flipped, it's corrected the next time the file is accessed. There's a scrub command that manually hits every file to check for integrity and you can schedule it through cron. And I assume you can control the size of the snapshots, I haven't looked into it but it would be pretty silly if you couldn't. I have four 3TB drives in RAID-Z and I have 9TB to play with, same as RAID-5.
patrickg_zill 13y ago
The command "zpool scrub POOLNAME" will go through and check all the checksums for you, and, you should use either RAID1 or RAIDZ (similar to RAID5) so that if it does detect an error, then the other copy of the data can be used to correct it. For snapshots - they only get made, if you make them (or setup an automated script that makes them). You can list the snapshots and see how much space each uses, as well.
axman6 13y ago
You seem pretty uninformed about ZFS so I'll try and help. As other have mentioned, there's the zpool scrub command which checks the integrity of the drive. Also, I'm not sure where you got the "ZFS keeps previous versions of files around" idea from, it only does that if you make a snapshot, and only modifications of the file cause the file to be copied; this is waht copy on write is. It means you can have the whole history of your file system with almost no space overhead except for changes. Apple's time Machine does the same thing, but in a different way: each directory that hasn't been changed since the last backup is hard linked to the previous backup's version (which might itself be a hardlink). this makes is quite space efficient (and a pretty easy to understand hack to get versioning on a file system that doesn't natively support snapshots)