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Comment by thedanbob | Hacker News Reader

File systems seem to be a particular weakness of Apple. HFS+ is pretty terrible. APFS is better, until something goes wrong and then it's just as terrible. Add "network" and the situation is 10x worse. I recently gave up on Time Machine (via Samba) entirely because it would regularly corrupt itself and destroy all my existing backups.

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macOS Snow Leopard almost adopted ZFS.

But a few weeks before release, Sun was acquired by Oracle.

It was going to take months of further negotiations to nail it down. Apple-sourced ZFS on macOS was canceled.

ZFS had been released by Sun before the Oracle Situation under their MIT-like CDDL.

I suppose when Big Tech is involved, they rattle patents at one another until the dust settles with handshakes and payouts all around. I'm speculating here. But I was told that the CDDL was not considered sufficient for Apple to support its own development efforts.

ZFS is relatively complicated, but it generally works. At the time, Apple was shipping servers with iSCSI SAN and a GUI comparable to Disk Utility.

Really a shame. I was running native ZFS on my Mac Pro that summer. Eventually migrated those pools to Open Solaris and eventually to Linux.

ZFS looked promising and capable at the time. Do you have any recommendations for today?

It can feel like until there's a bit more clarity or certainty publicly, or personally running multiple backups on different file systems is the default start, which isn't always ideal.

I like storage to become, and remain an appliance.

I’m managing hundreds of terabytes on (Open)ZFS in 2025. It’s as promising and capable as ever.

It doesn’t really have a stable and battle tested competitor in the FOSS arena considering its feature set.

(Of course there are things like Lustre and Glustre, but these are orthogonal solutions for different use cases.)

It's still promising and capable. Development is active and ongoing. I'm quite happy using it.

The path we've collectively chosen as an industry is to push those responsibilities further up the stack into the application layer.

No widely-deployed filesystem before or since ZFS is in the same league.

I love TrueNAS community which runs on ZFS for my NAS system.

For workstations I just use the distribution default. APFS on Mac, NTFS windows, and my Linux distro happens to use btrfs by default.

Something is deeply broken with Samba in macOS, all Samba versions and all macOS versions.

It just never works. And just when you think it's finally reliable and has worked for a while, it breaks in new unexpected ways. Sometimes hanging the whole machine. This was with both macOS as a server and a Linux server (less issues with Linux, but still broken).

Samba isn't great on other OSs either, but not as broken as on macOS. At this point I've given up on Samba completely, and consider it something I won't use again.

Hmm interesting. Can you expand more. I've been using samba continuously on Mac for a few years now. It's been good for me so far. There is the need to reconnect every once in a while due to sleep and wake but other than that it's been consistently good

I've never relied on Time Machine as a sole format of backup. If I ever used it I made sure the Time Machine backups were sent to a non-apple storage device.

Carbon Copy Cloner was excellent at creating a bootable backup, and Super Duper seemed very serviceable too.

I haven’t had that level of issues with CIFS on Apple platforms in general.

For most of iOS 18 there was a bug where iOS and iPadOS simply couldn’t connect to Samba shares on Linux but that has since been resolved.

Apple does implement some custom functions that make CIFS (Samba or Windows based) shares less performant than Apple platform served shares in certain situations. Especially for server side copy. TrueNAS has recently patched this so that it works.

Adopting/inheriting a CIFS-backed Time Machine share is needlessly precarious.

> For most of iOS 18 there was a bug where iOS and iPadOS simply couldn’t connect to Samba shares on Linux but that has since been resolved.

Yes, exactly. That bug also affected macOS Sequoia but IIRC could be worked around (not on iOS though). And that was just the latest series of bugs, the pattern repeats itself every once in a while and it got worse after they discontinued Mac OS X Server and their own Time Capsule. Every few months something breaks.

E.g. just in March 2025, the 13.7.5 update to Ventura (last OS supporting a 2017 Mac) broke SMB filesharing for many users. There was a workaround, but it was only fully fixed in 13.7.7 four months later.

The fruit extensions are useful for performance, but don't really help with connection issues / hangs. Aside from that, the main usecase they enabled in the past was working Timemachine backups, but my long-term experiences with Timemachine over the network (with Mac OS X Server, fully supported by Apple at the time) were less than stellar and so I'm not doing that ever again either.

Overall, it's just not a level of reliability I'm comfortable with for a network filesystem implementation.

I’ve had zero problem with macOS client against a Gentoo Linux samba server (with the apple extensions enabled for Time Machine, too).

Maybe your distro’s samba is out of date?

I find the other side of Samba can often have issues but updates have to be tested and managed carefully.

If/where there's hotfixes or patches needed, seeking scripts that can run when waking seem to be the only way to ensure any connectivity remains in place when opening one's laptop.

Never had a problem with Samba, though my use was modest (accessing some office shares, checking some files, etc).

I don't compile off of a Samba share for example, or do operations involving tons of small files frequently.

OS X used to use Samba, but Samba went GPL v3 so the rolled their own server implementation (smbx). The client is based on freebsd's code, I believe. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/SMBClient

Hard agree. Apple has lost my data on multiple occasions. I resized my Time Machine partition and that silently corrupted most of my backups.

Apple is the only company that makes such terrible file systems. I have resized partitions on NTFS and EXT3 and never lost any data. Apple is uniquely terrible in terms of file systems and data integrity in general.

I started using carbon copy cloner after the first time time machine corrupted the backup drive.

It seems quite fitting for a company which had been trying to deemphasize file management nearly since the original Mac.

Why Samba? That is not used unless you must support windows. NFS would probably better option for Linux, *inx and Mac.

I didn't know about that. I don't use windows at all, but have a Synology with a bunch of drives and use it with SMB for my multiple Macs and apple devices, haven't had any larger issues and things seem to work fine. Should I be switching to NFS ?

I wouldn't connect to SMB from Mac or Linux by choice on devices I control and could have them use another scheme.

I'd use SMB only if I had to connect to some corporate server on Windows, or if whetever system I connected to didn't support anything else.

It seems to be OK when there is plenty of free space but once Time Machine needs to prune older files it starts having problems (at least in my experience).

Samba is used for Windows support.

“Terrible” is a bit strong. If it’s good enough for John Siracusa it can’t be “terrible”.

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