Hello,
I’ve littered the forum with enough posts asking about how Time Machine works with ZFS (or, separately and more specifically, with TrueNAS and ZFS), how to set it up, and then about misadventures after setting it up that I thought it might be helpful to organize them all here.
It’s definitely good for me to remember what I’ve already asked about (and be able to jump back to the great responses I got), and maybe it’ll also help someone else.
Pre-Deployment Research
- December 29, 2024 Snapshots: Snapshotting an (SMB Target) Apple TimeMachine Backup Dataset: How to Configure Snapshots? This is almost two years old at this point, so it doesn’t track the current feature set TrueNAS includes that largely automates taking and snapshotting Timh Machine backups on TrueNAS, but it’s still a great discussion of using ZFS snapshots with Time Machine datasets in general (especially in ZFS environments where you have more manual control).
- October 18, 2026 Multi-User vs Single User: [TrueNAS CE 25.10] Apple Time Machine Shares: One Multi-User Share, or Separate Shares for Each Mac Using Time Machine?
And Then I Tried to Set One Up: The Adventure
- October 31, 2026: My Snapshots are Too Swole: Apple Time Machine's Client Side Encryption vs. ZFS Compression and Snapshots: A brief Halloween Horror Story (or Mystery?)
- October 31, 2026: Sync Writes and Apple Time Machine: Truly Awful, Horrendous, Very Bad Write Performance on Time Machine Backups: Or, Disabling Sync Writes for Time Machine (Data Integrity Implications?)
Coming Soon
- TrueNAS CE 25 or Later: How to Use the Built-In Time Machine Backup Dataset/SMB Share template features.