Back up to exFAT directly attached USB drive

Feature Requests
1

Problem/Justification
Backup volumes to a directly attached
drive in exFat format - so that backups can be accessed from Mac and Windows more easily.
I recently migrated from a synology NAS unit to TrueNas on a UGREEN 4800 plus - when my synology died - the first cause of action , I went to was my daily backups made on synology unit itself to an external drive- but that drive was in ext3 format and I couldn’t read on any windows or mac machines to find my files. So in the end I had to go to my offsite backup - which was slightly older but accessible.. in my new setup I would like to make my local daily backups onto a drive I cam actually read on local machines.. Because exFat cannot stall all the information on the original - there would probably be a need to add some meta data files to store anything that couldn’t be stored directly.. but the core contents of my family photo album of course would plugged into a mac or windows machine.

I have searched on this before and the alternative suggested options - don’t really appear good solutions to my specific problem.

  1. If I run the backup from another machine attached to the NAS - I need to keep that machine powered on 24/7 also.

  2. Performance of a cross network transfer is inferior to usb-c directly attached backup drive.

  3. Loss of some filesystem extend attributes is not the worst case scenario for me anyway - but could be worked around by creating a standardized meta data dot file/directory on exFat backup to retain them.

2

I suggest creating a VM to back up to it and passing through the USB PCI controller where you plug the usb drive into. then you can do transfers over the “network” but youll get faster speeds because you are using VirtIO instead of real 1 GIG ethernet cards.
The vm is on the same machine so no other machine needs to be powered on 24/7, its faster than network transfer.
if you use sync thing, I think they try to hold onto metadata stuff

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