sirozha

If only Apple TV could take audio input from other devices via an optical audio cable and via its HDMI port (if it were ARC), the HomePod speakers would suddenly become much more usable for playing other sources (like a game console, cable TV box, etc.) 

nunzy said:

This makes sense. Starbucks knows quality. They sell the world's best coffee, and so they need the worlds best technology.

You are kidding, right? World’s best coffee? That crap can’t even be called coffee. 

dcgoo said:

The NUC is also a solid platform for VMWare ESXi.  I installed ESXi on a Mac Mini once, but quickly became frustrated and took it off. 

Add to that the demise of OSX Server, I think the handwriting is on the wall for the Mini. Too bad IMO

I have a 2012 i7 quad core Mac Mini, which I used as the ESXi host at one point, but it's now sitting on my desk powered down. I also have a Skull Canyon NUC being used as an ESXi host. The NUC is running 12 VMs concurrently (with 32 GB of RAM installed). It boots ESXi off my NAS' LUN and all the VMs are hosted on the NAS LUNs as well. The NAS has an option to back up the LUNs, so it's a pretty sweet setup. The NUC has no internal storage at all - all the storage is on the NAS.  

StrangeDays said:

Those sound neat. I’m just not clear on whether you have to dedicate an entire HDD or volume to the TM use, or if you can allocate only a portion of the whole, or if it entirely depends on the kit being used. 

In case of QNAP, you specify the total space that is dedicated to Time Machine backups in the web GUI. This limits the size of each sparse bundle to the indicated space. If you start backing up several Macs to this Time Machine target, they share the space you indicated, and each sparse bundle cannot be larger than the indicated space. I know it doesn't make much sense, but that is how Apple designed Time Machine.

Let's say you specified 2 TB and you are backing up two Macs to this destination. Neither Mac's sparse bundle can grow larger than 2 TB, and combined, the two sparse bundles cannot exceed 2 TB.  If they approach 2 TB combined, Time Machine will start thinning the sparse bundles to free up space for the next backup. The same thing happens if the size of each sparse bundle approaches its provisioned limit of 2 TB.

However, once you have run the first Time Machine backup from both Macs, so both sparse bundles are provisioned with the maximum size of 2 TB, you can increase in the QNAP GUI the size dedicated to Time Machine to 4 TB. At this point, each sparse bundle will still be limited to 2 TB, and the total size dedicated to Time Machine backups will be 4 TB. The space dedicated to Time Machine backups on the QNAP doesn't have to be on separate volume. It CAN be on a separate volume if you create a volume specific to Time Machine, but it is normally located on the same volume where network shares live. Alternatively, you can also create the Time Machine target on an external drive via the same Web GUI by selecting the mounted external drive in the drop-down box as the volume where Time Machine backups will live. 

QNAP has flexible volumes, where the volume itself could be thinly provisioned and grow in physical size as it gets filled with data, so you have many different options. You can build your volumes so that they consist of one RAID group, or alternatively, you can have several RAID groups (of same or different RAID type) in the same volume. You can go as fancy or stay as simple as you wish. I think you can even build volumes across several NASes nowadays, but that's beyond what I do in my environment.  

Same here. However, I’ve run into a backup verification error multiple times over the past decade, and had to start the backup from scratch after each such incident. It still works amazingly well, though, and the restore via Time Machine is amazing. 

However, I can’t recall running into this issue in the past year, so maybe this was resolved in software (macOS or NAS). I use QNAPs.