ZFS vs OSX Time Machine

[Chuck Swiger]

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..


Caveat: Time Machine is a viable backup system, but you're outside the configurations which it supports.

TM really wants the backup to be located on an HFS+ filesystem because it makes very extensive use of hard links-- including hard links to directories-- which are not widely supported by other Unix filesystems.  Even if you choose to continue using ZFS storage, please note that you'll obtain significantly better results by using AFP instead of NFS filesharing.

Wikipedia has useful info here:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_%28Mac_OS%29
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck