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Stefano Marinelli

Stefano Marinelli

@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe remote
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With Apple phasing out AFP in macOS 27 and Time Capsules officially reaching end-of-life, it's time to move network backups to proper SMB.

If you run a FreeBSD server, you can build a fast, rock-solid, and secure Time Machine target powered by ZFS and Samba - neatly isolated inside a FreeBSD jail using Bastille.

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2026/01/28/time-machine-freebsd-jail/

Keep your macOS backups running smoothly via SMBv3 (with full vfs_fruit support) and full dataset quota control on ZFS!

#FreeBSD #macOS #TimeMachine #ZFS #BastilleBSD #Samba #SysAdmin #Backup #OwnYourData #SelfHosted #BSD #RunBSD #OwnYourData

Replies

8
Replying to @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe
Now with 25% more charisma

Now with 25% more charisma

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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@stefano if you use a classic jail with shared host IP, you can't do broadcasts / multicasts so you can't use avahi to advertise it as a Time Machine to the LAN.

If you use a vnet jail, there's a network performance penalty of both epair and netgraph. You need to pass in a full NIC or use SR-IOV to pass in a virtual NIC to get max performance 😭

This is my only complaint about it being in a jail
Replying to @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe
Gavin

Gavin

@_calmdowndear@mastodon.social remote
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@stefano how long have you been running this config for yourself? My experience is that Time Machine over Samba is “rock-solid” only until it isn’t. For probably 8 years now across multiple MacBooks and NASes I’ve had to trash my backup chain every 6-9 months because it gets in that state where it claims verification has failed and you can either

- keep the history but stop backing up
- or take new backups but lose all the history

I’d love to find a fix, but have never been able to.

Replying to @_calmdowndear@mastodon.social
Now with 25% more charisma

Now with 25% more charisma

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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@rl_dane @stefano @stefano modern SMB is actually good but clearly there's some special sauce that Windows does to make it so fast. MacOS has a pretty okay implementation but it's atrocious on Linux/BSD -- presumably due to the massive software fragmentation. I think Windows/Mac knows how to avoid unnecessary IO but the experience browsing it with terminal vs KDE dolphin vs Thunar etc is wildly different. I think some treat it like a local filesystem because it doesn't know any better and it wastes so much trying to get image/video/document previews etc etc
Replying to @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe
Replying to @feld@friedcheese.us
Now with 25% more charisma

Now with 25% more charisma

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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@rl_dane @stefano of course not, Samba switch to GPL3 way back so MacOS has written their own implementation starting around 2011 (??)

The MacOS variant is called SMBX and has a kernel module to make it fast too.

[I think] some of it is built upon mount_smbfs / smbutil which has been in FreeBSD for a long time, and they're still in MacOS so that makes sense.

The FreeBSD smbfs(4) man page says:

The smbfs filesystem driver supports only the obsolete SMBv1 protocol.
smbfs has known bugs and likely has security vulnerabilities. smbfs and
userspace counterparts smbutil(1) and mount_smbfs(8) may be removed from
a future version of FreeBSD. Users are advised to evaluate the
filesystems/smbnetfs port instead.


and there is no smbfs(4) man page on MacOS anymore so I don't know why they'd keep mount_smbfs if they didn't just wire it up to their new implementation