ZFS vs OSX Time Machine

[Malcolm Waltz]

I doubt the issues you are encountering have much to do with ZFS.

It sounds like you are using TimeMachine over NFS.  Obviously, Apple does not support that configuration:
http://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+nfs+site:apple.com

In my opinion, TimeMachine should only be used with block storage.  If you use any kind of file-sharing protocol (AFP, SMB/CIFS or NFS), TimeMachine is implemented using a sparse disk image broken into hundreds or thousands of separate files.  This is a hack at best.

Time machine works very well with locally attached storage, but if you need to use network storage, you might want to try iSCSI:
http://thegreyblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/using-zfs-with-apple-time-machine.html
http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/iscsi/iscsi.txt


On Apr 28, 2011, at 7:03 AM, Daniel O'Connor wrote:

> Does anyone else use ZFS to store TM backups?
> 
> I find that whenever my laptop (over wifi!) starts a TM the ZFS machine it's backing up to grinds to a halt.. Other systems streaming stuff over NFS from it also tend to stall..
> 
> I presume that TM is doing something which causes ZFS some issues but I'm not sure how to find out what the real problem is let alone how to fix it..
> 
> I am running FreeBSD midget.dons.net.au 8.2-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 8.2-PRERELEASE #8 r217094M: Sat Jan  8 11:15:07 CST 2011     darius at midget.dons.net.au:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MIDGET  amd64
> 
> It is a 5 disk RAIDZ1 with 1.29Tb free using WD10EADS drives.
> 
> I don't see any SMART errors or ZFS warnings.
> 
> I have the following ZFS related tunables
> 
> vfs.zfs.arc_max="3072M"
> vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1" 
> vfs.zfs.txg.timeout=5
> vfs.zfs.cache_flush_disable=1
> 
> Any help appreciated, thanks :)
> 
> --
> Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
> for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
> "The nice thing about standards is that there
> are so many of them to choose from."
>  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
> GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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