Mac OSX Time Machine and FreeNAS 0.7

Since FreeNAS 0.7 it is easy to configure TimeMachine to use a AFP share (like Apple's Time Capsule)... Here is a short howto :-)

First step: Configure FreeNAS

-> Enable AFP

-> Configure the share

• Automatic disk discovery - Enable automatic disk dicovery
• Automatic disk discovery mode - Time Machine
  

Second Step: Configure OSX Time Machine

-> Select System Preferences -> Time Machine

-> Select Backup Disk
-> and Authenticate
Thats it!


Your FreeNAS will work now similar than a TimeCapsule. Enjoy! Details can be found here...

I've combined this with ZFS. With two clients and regular backups since two months, I have here a compression (gzip) enabled volume with 238 GByte. The compression ratio (compressratio) is at 1.24x

freenas:~# zfs get compressratio data0/timemachine
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
data0/timemachine compressratio 1.24x -


Instead of 295 GByte, only 238 GBytes are used. IMHO this is great :-)

If you want to see how to do a complete restore of your system, please see my new blogpost "Mac OS X system restore using time machine and FreeNAS"

Overview of NAS Operation Systems

• CryptoNAS (http://cryptonas.org/) - Free
• EON (http://sites.google.com/site/eonstorage/, Blog http://eonstorage.blogspot.com/) - Free
• EuroNAS (http://euronas.de/web/index.php) - Commercial
• FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/) - Free
• Napp-it (http://www.napp-it.org/) - Free
• NASLite (http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php) - Commercial
• NexentaStor (http://www.nexenta.com/) - Commercial (Developer Edition is restricted to 4TB)
• Open-E (http://www.open-e.com/) - Commercial (Lite Version is restricted to 2TB)
• OpenFiler (http://www.openfiler.com/) - Free (Commercial support is available)
• PulsarOS (http://pulsaros.digitalplayground.at/) - Free (?), not released yet
• UnRAID (http://www.lime-technology.com) - Commercial (Basic Version is restricted to 3 Drives)

Do you have any experiences with one of those?

The Future of FreeNAS...

Please read here to get the latest news...

Read through this forum thread to see the actual discussion. In short...

FreeNAS 0.8 will be based on Debian GNU/Linux! Volker (the core developer) started an intermediate project called CoreNAS. FreeNAS 0.8 will be based on that.

Here is a short list of pros by Volker:

- Text and graphical installer that can be customized. This means no hand written install scripts anymore which causes some problems in FreeNAS

- WOL works in Linux

- lmsensor - A WORKING sensor framework which is a really needed feature in FreeNAS to check the CPU/MB temps and fan speeds

- Better Samba performance

- Ability to implement HA features

- System can be updated via 'apt-get' or any other deb package manager

- Better driver support

- Maybe 'ZFS' over FUSE (there is already one commercial product available that uses this feature)

- NFS4

- ...

What does this mean to me? I definetly want to have an OS which supports native ZFS (zfs on fuse is not an option). I don't need an extra small footprint or all of these 'special' features that some users of FreeNAS frequently requested (boinc, printserver...). I really appreciated the wonderful WebGUI of FreeNAS but if it is necessary, I'm not bound to it. As I have quite a lot experience with solaris, I will switch to Opensolaris. It has all I need except the AFP support. So I need to get more experience with Netatalk.

I am also really looking forward for the new features of ZFS like deduplication and crypto. If you are intersted about my experiences, you will find some here...

Nevertheless I would like to say many, many thanks for this wonderful piece of software!