TrueNAS - Create Time Machine Shares

It may be impractical to keep an external USB drive plugged into your mac, to act as your backup drive for Time Machine. Luckily, you can create a network share to backup your mac to.

First, we need to create a storage area where the backups will go. Click on Storage (1) and then Pools (2), before then clicking the three dots (3) of your ZFS RAID volume, and clicking Add Dataset (4).

Now we need to create our network share that will utilize that storage area. Click Sharing and then Windows Shares (SMB) before clicking through the paths (1) to select the dataset you just created, and click the purpose input field (2).

Be sure to select Multi-user time machine

Select RESTART SMB SERVICE? in order to restart the SMB service in order to immediately allow mac computers to use the share for time machine.

Thats it! Now all you have to do is open Finder on the appropriate mac, and select connect to server, before plugging in smb://x.x.x.x where x.x.x.x is the IP address of your TrueNAS server. Then you can open up time machine from your setting window and choose select drive and see the name of your SMB share as a drive to connect to.