I work on a Mac and the OSX Time Machine is a very nice and simple feature to have backups.
While I have some other Apple gear I didn't get an Airport Time Capsule because I already had a tiny Airport Express, the Time Capsule is pricy and I'm not certain it does RAID.
So, what I use instead is the FreeBSD-based FreeNAS on an N54L MicroServer. FreeNAS allows you to easily create a Time Machine Apple Share and it works seamlessly.
The nice thing here is that the FreeNAS share is stored on a ZFS disk! And I have periodic snapshots for those shares.
So, on one side you have Time Machine storing periodic snapshots and only deleting when it needs space.
And on the other side you have the ZFS snapshots that guarantee that nothing is truly deleted!
This proves to be an interesting combination because Time Machine does not expect such a situation when you are low on disk space.
When you are low on disk space OSX's Time Machine will try to remove some data to free some space. But if you have recent snapshots on your ZFS filesystem, deleting files will not create any free space!
So Time Machine will keep on going back in history and delete more and more in order to have enough space to do a backup. I'm pretty sure eventualy it will try to delete the whole history.
Once Time Machine goes free space berserk you have to stop it and fix the problem on the ZFS side.
Either you delete some snapshots, you increase the filesystem quota or move it to a larger array.
In order to prevent the damage Time Machine did, you have to use zfs rollback to go back to a good snapshot. And in order to find a good snapshot it might be worth using zfs diff too.
The Oracle documentation for ZFS Solaris is good enough for this although you might also want to look at the FreeNAS User Guide for your version.
Time Machine doesn't seem to be bothered by a rollback and will gladly continue using the same share and finish the backup!
All in all I believe it's a pretty good combination. In an alternate universe OSX and Time Machine knows ZFS natively but until then FreeNAS gets the job done.
While I have some other Apple gear I didn't get an Airport Time Capsule because I already had a tiny Airport Express, the Time Capsule is pricy and I'm not certain it does RAID.
So, what I use instead is the FreeBSD-based FreeNAS on an N54L MicroServer. FreeNAS allows you to easily create a Time Machine Apple Share and it works seamlessly.
The nice thing here is that the FreeNAS share is stored on a ZFS disk! And I have periodic snapshots for those shares.
So, on one side you have Time Machine storing periodic snapshots and only deleting when it needs space.
And on the other side you have the ZFS snapshots that guarantee that nothing is truly deleted!
This proves to be an interesting combination because Time Machine does not expect such a situation when you are low on disk space.
When you are low on disk space OSX's Time Machine will try to remove some data to free some space. But if you have recent snapshots on your ZFS filesystem, deleting files will not create any free space!
So Time Machine will keep on going back in history and delete more and more in order to have enough space to do a backup. I'm pretty sure eventualy it will try to delete the whole history.
Once Time Machine goes free space berserk you have to stop it and fix the problem on the ZFS side.
Either you delete some snapshots, you increase the filesystem quota or move it to a larger array.
In order to prevent the damage Time Machine did, you have to use zfs rollback to go back to a good snapshot. And in order to find a good snapshot it might be worth using zfs diff too.
The Oracle documentation for ZFS Solaris is good enough for this although you might also want to look at the FreeNAS User Guide for your version.
Time Machine doesn't seem to be bothered by a rollback and will gladly continue using the same share and finish the backup!
All in all I believe it's a pretty good combination. In an alternate universe OSX and Time Machine knows ZFS natively but until then FreeNAS gets the job done.
