New Time Machine Settings / Cache?

[Conson Droppa]

Quick question.... With the new Time Machine SMB/export settings in the 6.7.0 RC releases, is it safe, recommended, or not recommended to set cache to "Yes" on these shares. I have them currently set to Cache = "No" and restricted to 500Gb each and including only one disk. I am not sure if unRaid treats the TM *.sparsebundle file as a single file or not.  

 

Bravo for implementing this feature BTW with the size limit feature. i am now able to disconnect 5 external HDD's around my house. It works flawlessly so far. 

 

 

[stebwen]

did you find an answer to your question?
or have you tested it? does it work properly, Apples time machine with the Unraid cache?

thx in advance

[theruck]

my experience here is that the sparse bundle and unraid is a very bad combination over SMB and cache drive has no positive effect on the time machine share after other than the first backup.

here is why:

 

1. the first backup will be performed to the cache drive which will be moved by mover to the destination drive

2. the indexer will try to index the time machine backup afterwards whenever it wants so it will acess the files very often and make your destination drive go mad several times during the week

3. the next backup inserts data into the existing sparse bundle files so it will update on the destination drive and thus skipping any cache drive as the sparse bundle files will just grow in size and will not be created as brand new files on the cache drive.

4. SMB and time machine is slow as hell even with the many SMB fine tune configuration. the obsolete AFP performs many times faster.

 

same applies to iphone backups (being a sparsebundle image too) redirected over a symlink to the SMB share. The first backup will run fine but it will not be restorable because the listing of the sparsebundle takes so much time that the application is not able to retrieve the backup information.

[stebwen]

38 minutes ago, theruck said:

SMB fine tune configuration. the obsolete AFP performs many times faster.

this is something that i recognised generally when working with mac OS. AFP performs better, but is not recommended anymore and will be gone in the next UNRAID version.

How can I tune the SMB for mac OS? Do you have experience there? Is there a plugin? I have no idea how this could work to tune SMB?

Thanks for any recommendation. Should we open a new topic?

[JorgeB]

Best bet would be to use a disk share for that, instead of a user share, performance of user shares with small files will downgrade a lot.

[theruck]

there are plenty of recomendations out there for SMB tunings. none of them seems to work for me. my sparsebundle performance over SMB is so terrible that it is unusable for timemachine. i recently upgraded the hardware just to find out that it sucks the same as before.

see

 

[CS01-HS]

On 1/20/2021 at 6:09 AM, theruck said:

there are plenty of recomendations out there for SMB tunings. none of them seems to work for me. my sparsebundle performance over SMB is so terrible that it is unusable for timemachine.

 

I haven't tested enough to gauge the relative effectiveness of each of these tweaks (some may even be inadvisable) but overall my Time Machine backups are working "reasonably" in 6.9.0-RC2

 

In Samba extra configuration:

[global]
   #Fix for 6.9.0-rc2 Mac client search
   spotlight backend = tracker
   # speed tweak
   nt acl support = No
   # tweaks from https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Better_with_Mac_OS_X
   min protocol = SMB2
   fruit:metadata = stream
   fruit:model = MacSamba
   fruit:posix_rename = yes 
   fruit:veto_appledouble = no
   fruit:wipe_intentionally_left_blank_rfork = yes 
   fruit:delete_empty_adfiles = yes  

#Custom
include = /boot/config/smb-custom.conf

 

Where smb-custom.conf looks like this:

[Time Machine]
path = /mnt/fast/Time-Machine
comment =
browseable = no
writeable = no
read list =
write list = backups
valid users = backups
vfs objects = catia fruit streams_xattr
fruit:time machine = yes
fruit:time machine max size = 552000M
case sensitive = auto
preserve case = yes
short preserve case = yes
spotlight = yes

 

And fast is a cache-only NOCOW BTRFS RAID 5 pool to which this custom conf allows direct access (bypassing shfs.)

More details on that here: 

 

 

Finally, I wiped my previous sparsebundle and started fresh in Big Sur to take advantage of the new APFS formatting.

 

NOTE: The user "backups" in smb-custom.conf is one I created just for time machine (for security reasons from an older guide.)