I'm in the process of moving from a 2006 MacPro to a hackintosh server running Mountain Lion 10.8.2. As Murphy would dictate, the MacPro lost its root disk while I was working on building the hackintosh. I attempted a full restore from my Time Machine backup and it failed at various points in the restore (as I tried different dates to get it to work). I was able to reinstall the OS and then do a restore of much of what I needed, but it made me think about the reliability of HFS+. I have a large iTunes database of movies and music (1.83TB currently) that I would hate to become silently corrupted over time.
My current setup:
ReadyNAS NV+ with 4x1TB disks in a RAID5
Primary source for shared documents, pictures, software install sources (disk images, etc)
Backup source for the iTunes database
Server (mostly now on the hackintosh)
Time Machine Server (for other Macs in the house)
Primary source for iTunes database (OWC Qx2 external enclosure with 4x2TB disks setup in RAID5)
Backup source for documents and pictures (WD external enclosure with 2x1TB disks that are mirrored)
I have backup jobs that run on the NAS to mount/copy files to/from the server via SMB nightly.
On the new server, I'm using a 128GB SSD for the boot disk and have a 2TB WD Caviar black (which I am planning to use for user home directories, and possibly as the new target for the backup of documents and pictures) along with a 3TB Hitachi Deskstar (which I am planning to use for Time Machine backups of both the server boot disk and other Macs in the house).
I am contemplating using ZFS and have been trying to do as much reading on here as I can. I have a couple questions and concerns:
1) Would it be possible (and/or wise) to reformat the OWC RAID5 as ZFS? If not, would setting it to JBOD and handling each server individually be better (eg: setting up a raid10 which would result in ~4TB volume instead of ~6TB as it is now)
2) I've read of SMB issues and since this is currently the method I'm using to perform the backups between the NAS and the server, I'm wondering if I can use another method such as FTP or rsync (which the ReadyNAS also supports).
3) I'm sharing a number of filesystems out via AFP using OS X Server's Sharing feature (in addition to SMB so I could do backups via the NAS). I've read there's a fix ("hack"?) to fix this. How reliable is this?
4) Will Time Machine backups and restores work to remote Macs? I'm not sure how the remote Macs mount this, but I would guess AFP.
I know for local restores to the server, I would need to have the ZFS drivers installed to access it in the case of losing the boot disk (either installing ZFS drivers to the flash drive used for OS install or perform the OS install first, install ZFS drivers to the new boot disk and then restore).
Anything else I may be missing or not have thought about yet?
Sure would be nice if Apple would move to some other filesystem like ZFS
