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Date:      Fri, 29 Apr 2011 01:48:37 +0000
From:      Malcolm Waltz <mwaltz@PACIFIC.EDU>
To:        Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com>
Cc:        freebsd-stable List <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: ZFS vs OSX Time Machine
Message-ID:  <5ED49CD2-5FF2-4110-8EEA-F754373D16F3@pacific.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20110429010829.GA36744@icarus.home.lan>
References:  <537A8F4F-A302-40F9-92DF-403388D99B4B@gsoft.com.au> <20110428195601.GA31807@icarus.home.lan> <AF725CFF-86A4-4D65-A26E-496F6B9BD33E@gsoft.com.au> <20110429010829.GA36744@icarus.home.lan>

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On Apr 28, 2011, at 6:08 PM, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:

Be aware there are all sorts of caveats/complexities with iSCSI on
FreeBSD.  There are past threads on -stable and -fs talking about them
in great detail.  I personally wouldn't go this route.

Why can't OS X use CIFS?  It has the ability to mount a SMB filesystem,
right?  Is there some reason you can't mount that, then tell TM to write
its backups to /mountedcifs?


Ahh...  I see.  Well this works perfectly (iSCSI on ZFS):
http://www.nexenta.org/

Perhaps we will see some improvements in the future.

As for CIFS, yes some people do that.  I wouldn't, but whatever.  Certainly=
 you won't see _better_ performance.  Most people choose AFP for this (as d=
id the original poster).
http://www.nickebo.net/tag/benchmark/  (there are plenty of others)

As you can read in my previous posts, Time Machine needs block storage.  If=
 you don't use block storage, it will emulate block storage using a disk im=
age, which in this case is generating ~80000 files in one directory (sparse=
-bands).  Good luck with that.

If iSCSI is not stable on FreeBSD, then it's probably best not to store Tim=
e Machine data on FreeBSD.  Some people don't seem to have issues with this=
 (as one other poster mentioned).  I suppose it depends on how much and wha=
t kind of data you are backing up.

I can say that if you are backing up a media library and other normal user =
data using Time Machine, it definitely performs poorly (unusable) after a w=
hile if you are using anything but block based storage.  If it hasn't happe=
ned to you yet, just wait.  It will.




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