I am a newbie,

 

I have been looking to see if anyone has every set one up with a mac, and i cannot seem to find a person who has. My main questions are, will all the same set ups in the design forum work for a mac, also can i automatically save things to the server, as in Iphoto can the main file for that application be located on UnRaid, and the application work as usual or do i have to mount UnRaid like an external HD.

 

Hope this makes sense, any help i would greatly appreciate, as i am leaving for europe soon, and i want to get this server up and running.

I've had pretty good experience with my Mac and unRAID 4.7. Keep in mind I've only been using a Mac for 3 or so months guessing of course.

 

I'm not really a power user since I primarly use my Mac for iPhoto and some other basic photo stuff.

 

I primarly use unRAID with my Windows machines, but it seems to get the job done.

So how do you like it with Iphoto, are the photos kept on your disk drive as in the Mac Device or are they on the Unraid server and you can view them via iphoto.

 

Thank you for responding

Currently I have everything in iPhoto which is now approaching 33GB and I use PhoShare to backup to my unRAID machine. Today I was experimenting with the idea of Not Copying photos to my Mac and leaving them on my unRAID to see how fast iPhoto responds. Of course all the images shown in iPhoto are just thumbnails so it should respond pretty quickly.

 

From what I have read you do not want to Use/store your iPhoto Library on unRAID or any other type of NAS and access because its not using the same Mac format and it would currupt your Library.

 

Time Machine seems to backup pretty well using this addon

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=17009.0

 

I noticed my 33GB database in iPhoto equates to 4.9GB with the Photos referenced on unRAID. I didn't really notice any speed changes browsing images, which I'm guessing is because iPhoto creates thumbnails for quick browsing anyways.

I don't use iphoto, but i do use a mac and itunes for my tv shows, movies and music and it plays quite nicely.

i use unraid as a Time Machine (backup) server for all the macs (2) in our house

 

hope this helps,

 

steve

 

I use a mixed system but most of the unRaid in the house works with Macs.  I have yet to use it other than as a media server though

From what I have read you do not want to Use/store your iPhoto Library on unRAID or any other type of NAS and access because its not using the same Mac format and it would currupt your Library.

 

There actually is a way to accommodated for situations like this. You can use disk utility to create a sparse image on your server, mount it, and then store your database in that. The sparse image will have the exact same HFS+ file system as your Mac does and therefore not cause the corruption issues you speak of. It will also expand automatically as you add more data to it. I use this sparse image method to make a clone of my Macs for backup purposes. This way if I ever have to reformat my Mac I can restore it directly from the sparse image on my server over the network with the OS X installer. I prefer a 1:1 clone versus a Time Machine backup.

 

 

As to the original poster. All my computers except my HTPC are Macs and I have no issues. You can browse the shares using Samba (or AFP if you enable it) just like on a Windows PC. When you go to access a share it will automatically mount the share just like if you were browsing the files on a Windows computer over the network from your Mac.

@mrow

Do you have any info or links for what you did? I'm rather curious.

@mrow

 

I too would be interested on a little more direction on the sparse image.

What is being described is the packaging of a iPhoto Library, which consists of a bunch of small files viewed as one file by the Mac OS, inside a single disk image. This disk image can be made as read/write, allowing it to expand and add files. iPhoto is not actually one files as the Mac OS would make it appear, but rather a package. If you right click it in the Mac OS and hit "View package contents", you will see that it stores original, edits, thumbnails, ect. The reason just dropping the iPhoto database onto a Unraid share can corrupt it, is because it sees the package contents as the individual files that comprise it, thus splitting it among drives (depending on your share settings of course). By putting the library in a sparse bundle, you tell unraid that the contents of the image are all one file, thus it will not split anything up. It is important that if you are quickly adding data, that you keep that sparse bundle in a share that is utilizing one drive, or one drive just for the sparse bundle, and you have plenty of room for expansion.

Here are instructions on how to create a sparse image. I would not use the encryption option they talk about in this walk through unless you have some sensitive data, otherwise you will have to enter a password every time you mount the image.

 

http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/tutorials/how-to-make-an-encrypted-sparse-disk-image/

 

Also, in case it isn't clear in those instructions, no matter how big you make the sparse image, it will only take up as much disk space as the the amount of data you store in the image. In other words, make the image as big a you think you may possibly need it in the future because it won't actually take up that much disk space until you fill it with that much data. For instance, since the SSD in my MacBook Air is 256GB I made my image 256GB since that it biggest it could possibly get doing a 1:1 clone. But since I am only using 136GB of the disk, that is how big the image currently is.

 

So the sparse image will just mirror our hd on the Mac computer? What if I want everything on unraid and not the Mac as the photos I have are 3tb

The sparse image he created happened to be of his HDD. You do not need to create a image of your entire drive. Just create a image of the iPhoto library folder.