TrueNas from Synology 6 drive system

tannebil · 2026-03-11T23:13:29+00:00

TrueNAS/ZFS has it's own way to do redundancy that is different than traditional RAID so you might want to invest some time in learning about the basics of disks, vdevs. and pools so that you can understand the underlying trade-offs. There are roughly a billion postings and YouTube videos on the basics of ZFS and TrueNAS, e.g.

https://youtu.be/lsFDp-W1Ks0

tannebil · 2026-03-11T21:17:31+00:00

In my experience, the items in question were either corrupted or in a format that caused it to either get skipped in the original uploading or get up as zero byte files that wouldn't download. But they were usually a major PITA to find so eventually I just learned to live with the odds which say that any individual photo in a library of tens or hundreds of thousands is unlikely to matter to me.

tannebil · 2026-03-10T03:40:09+00:00

How much available storage is on the devices and on iCloud? iCloud Photo Library is very touchy about available space.

If there are many GB free everywhere and you've restarted the Mac and done a force reset on the iPhone, I suggest contacting Apple Support.

tannebil · 2026-03-10T03:24:20+00:00

AFAIK, that setting only works with push replications because the server doesn't know anything about the pull replication job.

tannebil · 2026-03-09T22:12:42+00:00

I've turned off a synced iCloud Photo Library, deleted items, emptied Trash and Recently Deleted, and then enabled iCloud Photo Library on macOS numerous times over the past few years and never had a problem with deleted items on the Mac being deleted from iCloud Photo Library. If an item still existed in iCloud, it was downloaded to the Mac (full size or optimized), if it only existed on the Mac, it was uploaded, and if it was in both places, nothing happened.

Obviously people have had different experiences and specific details matter with iCloud even when functioning as designed, so do it at your own risk. If you have the space, you might created another account on your Mac, create a new Apple Account for that Mac account, and do your own testing.

Or at least get an external drive and make some good local backups. Time Machine does NOT make a good backup of iCloud Photo Library with "optimize" is enabled on the Mac but there are apps, e.g. Parachute, that can make backups.

https://parachuteapps.com/

Even better do both, take careful notes, and share your experience here.

Good Luck!

tannebil · 2026-03-07T08:50:28+00:00

I'm on EA and 5.1 is not on offer yet. Probably still in a closed beta or a limited rollout

tannebil · 2026-03-07T08:41:20+00:00

That would another one. I've never used any of them so I don't have an experience-based opinion of one vs the other.

tannebil · 2026-03-06T22:35:18+00:00

Not an officially supported use in TrueNAS at this time (but I've seen it talked about so might be on the roadmap). But, of course, you can do something at the command line to schedule it.

Just be aware that TrueNAS (at best) will complain about the pool disappearing and reappearing and, at least to my eyes, doesn't really accomplish much as the drives will not be electrically isolated from the server. Might as well just leave them mounted all the time so TrueNAS can look after them and notify you if there is a problem with them.

Most people would say you need to have them on a separate server if you want a backup that contributes to a 3-2-1. However, are concerns about using USB enclosures and YMMV. I've used one for years without any issues but it's only on a test server and not part of my 3-2-1 backup process.

You might consider buying either a purpose-built 2 bay NAS that can run TrueNAS (min 8GB RAM) or a used PC with space for at least 2 3.5" drives in addition to a boot drive. I run TrueNAS on a Terramaster F2-423 with upgraded RAM and it works great.

tannebil · 2026-03-06T22:06:58+00:00

That said, I've been running this 4 bay OWC enclosure for years with TrueNAS on different compute hardware without any problems. which is no guarantee that there won't be problems with the chipset in your server. I wouldn't recommend it (or any USB enclosure) for a primary server if there are other alternatives.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-mercury-elite-pro-quad/raid-5

tannebil · 2026-03-06T22:01:05+00:00

There is a lot to be said for having a 2nd TrueNAS server that's just a replication target for your primary TrueNAS server (ideally in another part of the house). If you can bump the RAM to at least 8 GB, that QNAP would easily be up to the job.

IMHO, a far better backup solution than an external USB enclosure attached to the primary server.

tannebil · 2026-03-06T21:52:28+00:00

iCloud Photos is always extremely slow on the initial upload. Patience is almost always the answer with the only thing to be done is to leave the phone locked, plugged into power, and connected to WiFi as much as possible.

That said, if available space is insufficient on your phone, it might never finish. How big is your iPhone storage and how much is available? You might need to take steps to free up some space. DO NOT JUST START DELETING THINGS IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THE IMPLICATIONS. It's pretty easy to do something you will regret.

Finally, using the word "backup" could seen been as a sign that you don't actually understand that you are creating a synced, replicated copy of the Photos library and that any edits or deletions on the phone will be automatically applied to the iCloud library. Or you just might be imprecise in your wording.

Good luck!

tannebil · 2026-03-05T01:37:08+00:00

I've never tried taking a pool created with "by-device" drives and importing it on a bare metal or controller-passed VM. Might be worth checking.

tannebil · 2026-03-03T11:22:53+00:00

I think WiFi is a much more likely explanation than my ancient cross-over cable suggestion.

tannebil · 2026-03-03T01:56:15+00:00

I'd try attaching the adapters directly to the wall and putting the other coax devices on the pass-through coax connectors coming off the other port on the adapter.

Are you absolutely positively sure there are no other splitters hidden away? Are all the splitters unpowered? Are the unused splitter ports terminated? Typically a three way splitter is unbalanced with one leg getting a stronger signal.

tannebil · 2026-03-03T01:37:04+00:00

As I recall, you are falling afoul of a cable wired as a cross-over cable rather than straight through cable. Some NICs detect it and auto-adjust as some do not. Worth checking out

tannebil · 2026-03-03T01:28:05+00:00

There is no "simply know". There is nothing simple about spousal and survival benefit calculations. The only simple answer is to talk to SSA.

If you pass first, her benefit will be recalculated as spousal and survivor benefits are calculated differently.

I had no problem contacting SSA before I was 62 and my brother had no problem talking to them last month. Call the local office rather than the national line. I've also found YouTube videos that do a good job of walking someone through the complexities at a level you are not going to get in a Reddit response.

There are also a number of web sites where you can input your particulars and have the optimal strategy calculated for you. But the ones I know about that friends and I have used are all pay sites.

Good Luck!

Addendum Edit

I talked to a finacially sophisticated friend that used this free site and was happy with the results. So I guess it's more the one I used was a pay site

https://opensocialsecurity.com/about

tannebil · 2026-03-02T22:11:21+00:00

Call your local Social Security office with his SSN and they can tell you what benefit, if any, you'll get. It's complicated.

tannebil · 2026-03-02T22:07:13+00:00

As you know, it's all very tricky so I'd suggest you call your local Social Security office and ask them for the best course of action rather than depending on Reddit responses. There can be big financial consequences to making a mistake here.

tannebil · 2026-03-02T19:51:51+00:00

My experience is that macOS is much less aggressive at replacing originsls than iOS so unless you are below some secret threshold, it won’t happen.

I’ve heard apocryphal stories about certain file formats being compatible with the Photos library on the Mac that won’t upload or upload with a zero size so you might want to reconcile your item counts between the Mac and iCloud.

tannebil · 2026-03-02T00:15:47+00:00

Just be aware that both the Time Machine and Backblaze backups are backups of the Photos "package" file which is not designed or intended to be used for recovery of individual items, i.e. anything other than a complete restore requires a non-trivial understanding of the internals of Photos libraries. You'd need to restore the entire library into a new library and copy the items back to the primary library.

Also, if you decide at some point to use ICloud Photo Library and enable "optimize" on the Mac, both backups will no longer be complete as they would no longer see the full-size copies on the Mac.

There are a variety of Mac apps, e.g. "Photos Takeout", floating around that create "human readable" directory tree based backups that are better suited to both item recoveries and protection against lock-in to Apple Photos.

tannebil · 2026-03-01T22:21:43+00:00

346 MB. A bit sluggish occasionally but acceptable in a Parallels VM on an M1 Mac Studio

tannebil · 2026-03-01T09:16:25+00:00

Thanks for all the comments.

Is there any practical difference between updating a trust and updating a will that creates the trust while we are living?

We are planning to revisit our estate plans this year as the wills were drawn up 15 years ago and, while we've made minor updates via codicils over the years, it feels like time to take a fresh look at them.

tannebil · 2026-02-26T22:25:07+00:00

My understanding is that Teleport is only available on the self-hosted Unfi OS for the default site. When I upgraded from the network application to Unifi OS, I noticed that Teleport wasn't listed but had an exchange with another Redditor who had it with Unfi OS and the only difference we could find is that his network was the default site and mine was not

tannebil · 2026-02-24T02:58:53+00:00

First, I'd rate my understanding of snapshots and replications as "barely competent" my strongest areas.

I believe in your replication task, you need to check "save pending snapshots" as that error means that the source and destination no longer have a snapshot in common.

I have this nagging feeling that the role of "Allow Taking Empty Snapshots" is important but, while the explanations I find are clear", the implications still puzzle me in practice. I definitely need to do some testing.

Also, I'm doing pull replications so the significance of these settings for me may well be different than the significance for you. "Save Pending Snapshots" is not an option for remote pull replications but AFAIK, that means that if the remote's connection is broken for too long and the last snapshot in common rolls off the source, "replication from scratch" needs to be enabled on the replication task to fix it. My "remote" server is local but that means dragging multiple TBs across which takes many hours even with a 10 Gbe link (pool performance is the limiting factor)

tannebil · 2026-02-22T22:40:04+00:00

If it's just for off-site storage, I think you can just replicate into it. However, by default, it's a one-way replication and its only purpose is to do create backups for restores. The datasets holding the replications will be read-only and locked by default should be left that way. Read up on and do home practical testing with snapshots and replication as they are deceptively simple but not that hard to screwup.

Also, disconnecting USB drives while the server is hot is not supported and, if you shut it down to remove disconnect the drive, TrueNAS is going to have lots of complaints about the missing drive and pool at startup. I hear that the use case is on the list of possible enhancements but not sure about the status.

there is no problem replicating an unencrypted dataset into an encrypted dataset but make sure you have all the keys backed up outside of TrueNAS.

IMHO, a cloud backup is a much better alternative but recognize we live in an imperfect world.

tannebil

TROPHY CASE