Hello! I am following up on the old forum post
Mounting and using APFS sparse bundles over SMB www.truenas CANT LINK com/community/threads/mounting-and-using-apfs-sparse-bundles-over-smb.91519/)
It looks like now you are able to achieve this outcome using TrueNAS:
- Use an encrypted sparse bundle
- If somebody steals your server (even if hot) they get zero data
- Access over SMB from anywhere in your house
- Do backups using Mac computer in house with SMB and macOS Time Machine software
- If you come home with your laptop and open it, it will connect to server and start Time Machine backup automatically (errors are reported if it fails or no backup in a while)
- Backups are fast using APFS, no hours-long “preparing Time Machine backup”
- If you shutdown and unplug hard drive from NAS and directly plug into Mac, you can do a backup, possibly faster than using NAS, and then unmount and plug back into NAS for online access
These are all the features that the original Apple Time Machine device supports support.apple CANT LINK com/guide/mac-help/types-of-disks-you-can-use-with-time-machine-mh15139/mac
I haven’t set up TrueNAS to do this yet, but am asking here if anybody failed with any of those features above.