ZFS vs OSX Time Machine

[Daniel O'Connor]

On 29/04/2011, at 2:16, Malcolm Waltz wrote:
> 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

Hmm, I _am_ using AFPD, not NFS for this.. I will see about using an ISCSI disk image instead (although that would make it impossible to resize once it's created right?)

I see that the sparse disk image does use ~80000 files in a single directory which does take.. a while.. to stat..

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
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