But I have a question:

 

1) What is the best way to implement Time Machine backups for a Mac? Should I have a separate hard drive dedicated solely for this purpose? This is the only Mac on my network and I have 4 Windows machines also. I'd like to back these up to the unRAID server as well. Would I need a dedicated drive for these machines too? Or just a share for backups?

 

 

 

This reply should in no way be considered an expert opinion, but I have just reached the other end of the unraid journey, and can share how I handled it. 

 

In unraid, you set up user 'shares' which act like individual volumes within OSX, although they can actually span multiple, or all volumes. 

 

In unraid, you can specify which shares are allowed to use which disks. 

 

I have two macs backing up via TM to the server, and for simplicity, I allocated each time machine 'share' its own disk.  I did this because I conveniently had two drives of an appropriate size (3 times larger than the HD of the relevant mac is recommended).  If I didn't have those drives, I would have looked deeper, to see if there is a way to limit the amount of space TM is allowed to use - I'm pretty certain I skimmed a method to do this).  If you don't, then Time Machine will eventually take over all available space on the server.

 

It works really well the way I have set it up, and its nice to know my back up has a back up via the parity drive.

 

*disclaimer - I have no windows machines on my network.  Only OS X and Linux.

Thanks for the info. Are you running Mountain Lion and have you tried restoring from a Time Machine backup from unRAID?

Mountain Lion on one, and Lion on the other.  Seems to work just as if I'd plugged an external hard drive in via usb.

Mountain Lion on one, and Lion on the other.  Seems to work just as if I'd plugged an external hard drive in via usb.

 

Perfect, thanks for your helpful insight.

 

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