I’ve been using a ZFS dataset as a SMB destination for my macOS Time Machine backups. Inevitably I recently ran out of disk space on the underlying pool and the Time Machine backup became corrupted while it tried to shrink itself.
I just wanted to share that I was able to rollback my Time Machine dataset and macOS just picked it up and I have my full Time Machine history back. ZFS is frickin awesome!
Yeah, it’s really helpful that Time Machine will look at an existing backup and ask if you’d like to use the existing one or create a new one when you try to set it up.
If they only let you move an external drive based backup into a NAS… Lost almost 2 years of Time Machine history. Had all the data backed up elsewhere, so not the biggest deal, but would have been nice to have it all in Time Machine.
Hi @ikabir,
I’m not promising anything here but I was able to move time machine backups between drives before using
rsync -aPHAXS /old /new
However, this was probably between two NAS rather than the Mac’s external USB and a NAS. Still could be worth trying from the Mac terminal. Maybe make sure you have a recent version of rsync on the Mac first.
I have moved between NAS. Last time I used a zfs send/recv with syncoid for that.
I don’t think rsync works when moving an encrypted external usb drive backup to a NAS, you’d have to find a way to convert the APFS file system to a sparsebundle directory. Haven’t tested it recently though, so not sure if apple lets you convert them now.