.Dd April 25, 2021
.Dt TIME-MACHINE 7
.Os "Causal Agency"
.
.Sh NAME
.Nm Time Machine
.Nd an awful one
.
.Sh DESCRIPTION
If, like me,
you have a Raspberry Pi 3 at home
that you've just upgraded to
.Fx 13.0
which has a hard drive
from an old laptop
attached to it by USB adapter
with ZFS on it
and you want to
use that as a Time Machine
backup destination
over SMB using
.Xr samba 8 ,
despite
.Xr samba 8
being awful software
and using ZFS on a system
with only 1 GB of RAM
being a terrible idea,
this is how to do it.
.
.Pp
In
.Pa /usr/local/etc/smb4.conf :
.Bd -literal -offset indent
[global]
vfs objects = zfsacl catia fruit streams_xattr
fruit:metadata = stream
fruit:model = Macmini

[TimeMachine]
read only = no
path = /media/zhdd/backup/TimeMachine
fruit:time machine = yes
fruit:time machine max size = 250G
.Ed
.
.Pp
The important thing here is
.Sy zfsacl
in the vfs objects list.
Most pages will tell you about the others,
but without
.Sy zfsacl
Time Machine will just fail to
create the backup
and not provide any useful error.
I'm not actually sure if the
.Sy fruit:metadata
setting is required,
but a bunch of pages recommend it.
The
.Sy fruit:model
just makes it look nice in Finder.
The rest creates an SMB share called
.Dq TimeMachine
that macOS will be willing to use.
You can limit the size of the share that
.Xr samba 8
reports so that Time Machine
doesn't fill up the whole drive.
.
.Pp
The other important thing to do
is to create some swap space.
When I first tried backing up
to this share,
it stopped after a while
because
.Xr smbd 8
got killed
when there was nowhere to swap pages to.
A wiki page told me to
create swap on ZFS like this:
.Bd -literal -offset indent
zfs create -V 2G \e
	-o org.freebsd:swap=on \e
	-o checksum=off \e
	-o compression=off \e
	-o dedup=off \e
	-o sync=disabled \e
	-o primarycache=none \e
	zhdd/swap
swapon /dev/zvol/zhdd/swap
.Ed
.
.Pp
To be fair to
.Xr samba 8 ,
most of the memory
is being used by the ZFS ARC
.Po
which you can see in
.Xr top 1
.Pc ,
but
.Xr smbd 8
still seems to be using
far more memory than is reasonable.
It's interesting seeing processes
with 0 RES in
.Xr htop 1
because they're all being swapped out
while the ARC takes half the available RAM.
And having to wait for my shell
to be paged back in when I quit
.Xr htop 1 .
.
.Pp
Anyway,
as expected this whole thing
is terribly slow.
On my initial backup,
I'm currently at 26.49 GB
of 104.22 GB
with an estimate of 8 hours remaining.
Normally transfer time estimates
are wildly inaccurate,
but I think in this case it's right.
.
.Sh AUTHORS
.An june Aq Mt june@causal.agency
.
.Sh BUGS
.Fx
doesn't seem to want to mount
the ZFS volumes on the hard-drive-over-USB
automatically at boot.
I have to
.Xr zpool-import 8
the drive manually each time.
I don't know if there's a workaround for this,
but I don't have anything essential
to the system on the drive,
and it doesn't need to reboot often.