Networked Time Machine discs: Synology NAS, Airport Extreme, or both?

[Eug]

I have a Synology 211j NAS with a USB-attached EXT4 formatted 750 GB hard drive that's empty. I have activated their Time Machine support in Synology's DSM 3.2 beta OS, which supports Lion.

I also have an Airport Extreme with a USB-attached HFS+ formatted 500 GB hard drive that's empty. So, it is set up for Time Machine support as well.

Both devices are hooked up via wired Gigabit.

Any drawbacks to using one or the other for Time Machine backups? I'm thinking Airport Extreme with HFS+ is Apple native, so that might be best. But OTOH, HFS+ gets boos for its reliability, esp. when compared to EXT4. I don't think either is going to be particularly fast though, since they're USB 2.0. The NAS does have RAID1 internal drives, but its chipset isn't particularly fast either, even for transfers from the internal drives. I think I get something like 22 MB/s out of that RAID.

I can move both USB drives to the NAS, or both drives to the Airport Extreme, although the latter is inconvenient.

 

[manly]

I have a Synology 211j NAS with a USB-attached EXT4 formatted 750 GB hard drive that's empty. I have activated their Time Machine support in Synology's DSM 3.2 beta OS, which supports Lion.

I also have an Airport Extreme with a USB-attached HFS+ formatted 500 GB hard drive that's empty. So, it is set up for Time Machine support as well.

Both devices are hooked up via wired Gigabit.

Any drawbacks to using one or the other for Time Machine backups? I'm thinking Airport Extreme with HFS+ is Apple native, so that might be best. But OTOH, HFS+ gets boos for its reliability, esp. when compared to EXT4. I don't think either is going to be particularly fast though, since they're USB 2.0. The NAS does have RAID1 internal drives, but its chipset isn't particularly fast either, even for transfers from the internal drives. I think I get something like 22 MB/s out of that RAID.

I can move both USB drives to the NAS, or both drives to the Airport Extreme, although the latter is inconvenient.

I don't think the native FS really matters for Time Machine over NAS. If Airport Extreme is already your router/gateway, you might as well use it for TM (?) Throughput really doesn't matter for hourly backups unless you're habitually throwing off large file changes. Even then you could isolate transitory file updates to a temp folder & exclude that from TM.

Finally I think you have multiple Macs, do you need to limit the max size of each TM backup at the sparse bundle's level? Off the top of my head, that should be possible for either backup disk.

 

[Eug]

How do I limit the TM backup size? One brute force method would be to partition the drives but how do I do what you mention?

I do have multiple Macs, but the biggest, most space hungry one has a dedicated 1.5 TB Time Machine drive.

The networked drives are more for backups of my laptops and HTPCs, etc.

 

[vbuggy]

I'd go with / stick with USB discs. Unless you like fixing sparsebundles / redoing backups from scratch.

 

[manly]

I'd go with / stick with USB discs. Unless you like fixing sparsebundles / redoing backups from scratch.

How do you fix sparse bundles?

When Time Machine backs up to a remote volume, it sets the max. backup size to the volume size, i.e. 500GB for Eug's AEB. You can instead manually create the sparse bundle with a hard-coded limit with Disk Utility or CLI. There's a naming-convention to the file, basically it needs to have the Mac's Ethernet MAC address. A rule of thumb is twice the Mac's boot drive size is appropriate.

I'm curious how Mac OS X Server handles client TM backups, do you normally create a separate share for each Mac?

 

[MisterNHH]

You can set a quota on the Users section of the Synology control panel. The quota limits how much storage any particular user can access. I set up 2 users, one unlimited and one with a quota. I use the one with a quota as the default and log in with the unlimited account to access the full storage of the NAS.