8 ms·

Time Machine backups should live on Apple Filesystems. The Ext4 or btrfs in Synology's is a timebomb for Apple's proprietary data blobs. It has something to do

Time Machine backups should live on Apple Filesystems. The Ext4 or btrfs in Synology's is a timebomb for Apple's proprietary data blobs. It has something to do with the filesystem attributes. I asked my father to just give up on it. Just manage pictures through the file system. Photos (former iPhotos) databases also get corrupt on a Synology NAS. It's a matter of time. The strange thing is that it can go well for months on end, giving you a false sense of security. Do iCloud or local drive backups or stay away from Time Machine and Apple Databases is my advice (although my father had a lot of problems as well with an "incorrectly unplugged" external HFS+ drive). I can't find the sources right now but after my father's last drama (and there have been several) I did some intensive searching and this was my conclusion.

Maakuth 5y ago
Are these applications really adding so much value that it's worth it with their proprietary catalogs? My personal solution for photo storage is a normal directory tree with files. I have Piwigo set up to catalog those so that I can browse by shooting date and tags, but the file hierarchy stays untouched. I can pull files from there to edit with any application and there's a lot of proven tools to keep the files in good shape and backed up.
- teekert 5y ago
  If you're in the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone, some iPads and a Macbook, you sort of roll into it. Is it worth it? Not sure, it's sure easy and just works. But you're on your own when you try to interface with your data in "non conventional" ways. I myself use NextCloud for everything, I recently moved from Android to iOS and it's nice to see most things working... except that NextCloud has issues making previews from .heic pictures (or I should say heic picture containers containing heif images coded in hevc :s), and so the drama starts again. It's always plug and pray outside the Apple ecosystem, always ymmv.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    I like your quotes around "non conventional", as everything about storing files in a directory is the traditional and conventional way to store files.
    - teekert 5y ago
      Haha, yes it felt wrong subconsciously to call it non-conventional. Now that you mention it, I totally agree that it is Apple who in the games of doing things the non-conventional way. The opposite of the Unix philosophy. "Take all things, throw them together and make sure they only work in one, blessed, linear way."
      - MereInterest 5y ago
        Every once in a while I'll make an external backup of my parents' photo collection. Every single time, it's a royal pain to figure out where Apple has decided to put the iPhoto directory. There's no UI that points to it, no settings to configure the save location. It's like you're supposed to forget that these are your pictures to access as you please, and instead treat them as iPhoto's pictures, only to be accessed in the blessed interface.
- msh 5y ago
  I love that I can quickly click on a person and then get all the photos with that person. The same for a location. The "memories" slideshows that iPhone or gphoto generate are sometimes also very nice to see. The search functionality also comes handy once in a while. So that I can search for pictures of certain things. For sharing photos the shared albums are also very easy to work with. Both to create and the receiver to import any interesting photos to my/their library.
- q-rews 5y ago
  Giving up the file system is difficult but it’s a godsend. I hated losing the Events when moving from iPhoto to Photos, but in practice no one wants to organize photos and I certainly did not enjoy it, as anal I as I was. Nowadays we don’t have events anymore, it’s just a continuous flow or random photos that may or may not belong to a specific event. The great part is that photos are always in chronological order and I never have to deal with “files” (copies, same names, etc). The only exception are professionals and Photos.app definitely isn’t intended for them.
  - Maakuth 5y ago
    I too prefer chronological order instead of some "organized" collection of directories. My point is that this is something that a photo indexing app of some sort (Piwigo in my case) should do and leave the files be.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  No. The only filing system you need is... the file system. These companies (Apple especially) love to pretend that nobody had anything organized until they came along. Don't store your important media in proprietary formats, or "the cloud."
- puppet-master 5y ago
  Yes, definitely. In the case of Lightroom, it is preserving your original input photo along with a list of edits and workflows you've applied to it. It also manages a database of preview images, so browsing full resolution albums is fast There are no destructive edits in Lightroom unless you really go out of your way to cause the destruction It also has client-side face recognition / clustering which relies on a local database, indexing by geographic location for GPS-tagged images, etc. Essentially nobody needs Lightroom until they try it, after which it easily becomes impossible to live without and there is no replacement
  - hanklazard 5y ago
    > Essentially nobody needs Lightroom until they try it, after which it easily becomes impossible to live without and there is no replacement I’ve tried Dark Table, but I’m afraid you may be correct. Trying to switch after 7 yrs of LR feels really challenging.
    - petepete 5y ago
      I've used Capture One Pro for a similar amount of time and anything else (LR included) feels like a step down. Probably mostly inertia and familiarity by this point.
      - hanklazard 5y ago
        Yeah, my goal is to be able to run my next photo software natively on a linux box, and to my knowledge Capture One is only available on MacOS and Windows. It does look like great software, though.
        petepete 5y ago
        Yeah, it and Affinity Photo are pretty much the only reason I keep a Windows partition now. I think Darktable looks like a contender but I'd prefer to be able to make it just use Adwaita and look normal.
  - 5y ago
mobilemidget 5y ago
"get corrupt on a Synology NAS" omg reading this made me relive that horror I encountered too, of course with pics of the little one. Now I have 3 backups (of which 1 is just an export again of all the pictures in raw) in 2 locations, using Lightroom, I don't trust photos anymore, and yes on apple filesystems.
- chromatin 5y ago
  Also worried about pictures of the little ones. My solution was for the LR database to live on local SSD, and the library/catalog on an SMB share on a ZFS server, with weekly backup to AWS Glacier. Other than having to reconnect anytime I wake up the machine from sleep, it works pretty well, and I never have worried about corruption. Only flaw in the plan AFAICT is that if a bug in LR or the Mac introduce corruption XFS will happily store the checksummed corrupted file. I should probably add ZFS snapshots.
izacus 5y ago
> Time Machine backups should live on Apple Filesystems. Well, my Time Machine keeps corrupting backups even when targeting the Apple Time Capsule, so I'm not sure if that really helps at all.
simondotau 5y ago
Time Machine backups on remote drives do live inside an Apple file system. They are stored as a mutable disk image. The critical setting for reliability is to use AFP and not SMB. To this end I have two Synology NAS devices—a multi drive unit shared as SMB for general use and a single drive unit shared as AFP for Time Machine. While I do have occasional backup trees go bad (once every two or three years) the backups themselves are still fine and so I just start a fresh one.
- op00to 5y ago
  THIS. AFP not SMB.
  - Jnr 5y ago
    We tried it with AFP as well, did not help, after some time those time machine backups got corrupted. We suspected that maybe AFP writes failed because computers were disconnected from network before buffer was written to the server. But there are no visual indicators for that and we did not want to debug it. We just switched to 3rd party backup solution.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  That's not what Apple recommends. Time Machine is pretty shit these days. With their cloud/services strategy, it simply get abandoned. I use time machine, but I don't trust it, so I have other solutions as well
  - simondotau 5y ago
    It doesn't matter what Apple recommends—the recommendations are just dead wrong. AFP works and SMB does not. I religiously check backups and I know they are working.
    - vatrikpolker 5y ago
      Slackware is actually the one distro I've succeeded deeply with AFS. One thing that made everything less buggy is to find out what your UID , User ID, was, on the OSX UNIX-compatible system e.g. 1001, let's say, and just make sure the co-responging AFS user/share on the other end shared the same. - No bugged idea why it matters but within linux' AFS implementation paired with OS X it seems to be crucial for some reason, and a lot less headaches. So therefore: user ' osxking ' with UID ' 1001 ' connects best to user ' osxking ' UID ' 1001 ' on your Slackware AFS server. Good luck man! It will work! < 3 Happy AFS'ing, Slackware served me well!
vetinari 5y ago
> It has something to do with the filesystem attributes. Synology can do all the attributes the HFS+/APFS can do. They do not use standard samba *_xattr modules though, they use their own and the result is all the @eaDir stuff. Do not delete it! On the other hand, Time Machine is perfectly capable of damaging its archive on the local drive just fine.
Jnr 5y ago
I did use time machine on external USB HDD and after some time it got corrupted. Happened multiple times over the years. Then I tried Time Machine using AFP and SMB on remote NAS. Those also got corrupted multiple times. The lesson I learned was - do not use TimeMachine. Now I have been using Vorta (UI for Borg) https://github.com/borgbase/vorta https://github.com/borgbase/vorta for a long time and everything is fine.
- hanklazard 5y ago
  > Now I have been using Vorta (UI for Borg) https://github.com/borgbase/vorta https://github.com/borgbase/vorta for a long time and everything is fine. Same. I really like it. Also sending my backups to https://borgbase.com https://borgbase.com which was relatively painless to setup.
climb_stealth 5y ago
I suggest using Carbon Copy Cloner [0]. I have been bitten by Time Machine corrupting itself and I'm never going back. It works well and they have excellent documentation for pretty much every scenario. And USB backups are bootable. I'm mostly using it with backup to a NAS. [0] https://bombich.com/ https://bombich.com/
- submeta 5y ago
  Not bootable with latest MacOS anymore, at least not easily. But ignoring that: CCC is an excellent backup solution for MacOS. Have been bitten by Time Machine twice. Still use it, but do not rely on it.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  Another vote here for Carbon Copy Cloner. I have a 3x backup combo of Time Machine to local Synology (and I may as well not bother with this), Arq Backup to Arq Cloud (not flawless but I trust it more than Time Machine) and CCC to local USB-C SSD drives. CCC is the only backup I actually trust out of the 3, but it's not automatic and relies on my plugging my backup SSDs in occasionally to clone the whole drive. (Which is more an issue with my workflow than CCC itself).
pembrook 5y ago
Filesystem likely doesn’t have anything to do with it. What’s more likely, is Apple’s notoriously unreliable implementation of SMB causing the problem (and that’s the only option now that AFP support on Mac is dead) I have a Synology DS220+ and connecting to it from a Windows machine vs a MacOS machine is like night and day. On Windows, it literally feels like the NAS is an extension of my local hard drive. Browsing huge directories of thumbnails is snappy, file and folder names appear instantly. It’s a dream. On MacOS, connecting to anything over SMB is a total nightmare. Aside from the constant mounting and unmounting (fun!), it’s just plain unreliable and slow. And people have been complaining about this for years. What’s even more funny, I have a friend who works for Apple and apparently they use NAS storage in some teams and deal with the exact same annoyances! If Apple’s own employees have this problem, it’s hopeless they'll ever fix it for customers. I’d put my money on Apple’s SMB implementation being the root cause of this file corruption issue that has been all over the Reddit Synology user forums lately.
- dystopiabreaker 5y ago
  Unfortunately, despite being a nightmare, SMB seems to be still be the best option for networked filesystems on macOS. AFP is now officially deprecated/unsupported, and the NFS client seems to be even worse than Samba/SMB. One last hope was macFUSE/sshfs, however this seemed also to be more or less broken when I tried it (extremely slow speeds, issues with disconnecting, etc).
  - chromatin 5y ago
    There’s also NFS but it seems to be just as slow as SMB on MacOS.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    There's also the option of rsync, though obviously not helpful for live access.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  Well. SMB is a Microsoft's proprietary protocol. Of course, the windows implementation will be better.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
That last iPhoto update killed my album, and I've lost a shit tonne of photos and videos. And I couldn't even use my backups either because when I open then up, they too needed to read the entire album to do facial recognition etc... took a few days for each backup, but I only knew photos/videos were gone after all drives had been "updated". One of these days, I'll plan on writing my own photo management system, with recoverable indexing, optional facial scanning, and zero phoning home.
cwizou 5y ago
Like many here I had the exact same issue mentioned by the poster, Time Machine on Synology just kept failing, with incredibly unhelpful error messages that basically said, let's trash and backup again. I used AFP which was recommended back then and that worked really well for years (since 2011). But since (maybe) Catalina, issues started creeping up and it would just randomly fail. It used to be once in a while, then it became a weekly occurence before I gave up. Samba isn't better, my mounted shares get randomly disconnected overnight fairly often too (even now on Monterey), and switching from the old Synology to a fresh dedicated NAS machine didn't change a thing. At that point I think in general it's just "local networking" that became less reliable around that time, whether it's some power saving feature, or something else up the stack, I don't know. The only scenario where Time Machine works flawlessly for me is using an external SSD drive for backup, formatted as APFS. At least for now.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  Exact same experience. At this stage I think Time Machine is barely fit for purpose for backing up over the network. I've lost days on this issue over the years too. I have always been totally confused as to whether I should be using AFP or SMB (tried both). As others have said, SMB often seems very unreliable, and AFP is supposedly being deprecated... Mounting network shares from my Synology to Mac(s) is never flawless either. As other comments have noted, this experience is very much worse than what it used to be like in Windows (not that I've mounted network shares in Windows for a while).
  - cwizou 5y ago
    And same exact experience on mounting shares by the way. When setting up my new NAS last week, I ended up booting a Windows PC to check if Samba was correctly configured because macOS kept throwing weird inscrutable errors semi randomly. I know it's a terrible protocol but it certainly became worse on macOS on the past 3 years-ish.
- willyt 5y ago
  I have a couple of 6tb usb disks formatted as a Btrfs RAID 1 volume plugged into a Rpi4, it's not the fastest but it has been reliable for over a year. I always make sure I stop the backup before pulling the cord on my laptop though. My wife hadn't been doing this until recently and she has had more problems with both over the network and directly connected usb disks; she has both. At some point I'm going to create a duplicate setup in my house and send Btrfs snapshots over the internet to have an offsite backup, but I haven't got round to this yet. Currently our offsite backup is just taking a laptop home...
wjamesg 5y ago
I have all my photos prior to a certain date in an old iPhoto collection. Can anybody recommend a good way to get photos out of iPhoto without having to manually export thousands of photos?
- kall 5y ago
  If you‘re ok with just the raw files, right click the library and "Show Package Contents". Then sort by folder size to find the bulk of your photos or create a spotlight query that aggregates all images above a certain size from subfolders. If you edited a lot of photos, it might be messy. If you didn‘t, I think they are all in a folder called Originals, grouped by year then import session.

Maakuth 5y ago

Are these applications really adding so much value that it's worth it with their proprietary catalogs? My personal solution for photo storage is a normal directory tree with files. I have Piwigo set up to catalog those so that I can browse by shooting date and tags, but the file hierarchy stays untouched. I can pull files from there to edit with any application and there's a lot of proven tools to keep the files in good shape and backed up.

teekert 5y ago
If you're in the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone, some iPads and a Macbook, you sort of roll into it. Is it worth it? Not sure, it's sure easy and just works. But you're on your own when you try to interface with your data in "non conventional" ways. I myself use NextCloud for everything, I recently moved from Android to iOS and it's nice to see most things working... except that NextCloud has issues making previews from .heic pictures (or I should say heic picture containers containing heif images coded in hevc :s), and so the drama starts again. It's always plug and pray outside the Apple ecosystem, always ymmv.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  I like your quotes around "non conventional", as everything about storing files in a directory is the traditional and conventional way to store files.
  - teekert 5y ago
    Haha, yes it felt wrong subconsciously to call it non-conventional. Now that you mention it, I totally agree that it is Apple who in the games of doing things the non-conventional way. The opposite of the Unix philosophy. "Take all things, throw them together and make sure they only work in one, blessed, linear way."
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      Every once in a while I'll make an external backup of my parents' photo collection. Every single time, it's a royal pain to figure out where Apple has decided to put the iPhoto directory. There's no UI that points to it, no settings to configure the save location. It's like you're supposed to forget that these are your pictures to access as you please, and instead treat them as iPhoto's pictures, only to be accessed in the blessed interface.
msh 5y ago
I love that I can quickly click on a person and then get all the photos with that person. The same for a location. The "memories" slideshows that iPhone or gphoto generate are sometimes also very nice to see. The search functionality also comes handy once in a while. So that I can search for pictures of certain things. For sharing photos the shared albums are also very easy to work with. Both to create and the receiver to import any interesting photos to my/their library.
q-rews 5y ago
Giving up the file system is difficult but it’s a godsend. I hated losing the Events when moving from iPhoto to Photos, but in practice no one wants to organize photos and I certainly did not enjoy it, as anal I as I was. Nowadays we don’t have events anymore, it’s just a continuous flow or random photos that may or may not belong to a specific event. The great part is that photos are always in chronological order and I never have to deal with “files” (copies, same names, etc). The only exception are professionals and Photos.app definitely isn’t intended for them.
- Maakuth 5y ago
  I too prefer chronological order instead of some "organized" collection of directories. My point is that this is something that a photo indexing app of some sort (Piwigo in my case) should do and leave the files be.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
No. The only filing system you need is... the file system. These companies (Apple especially) love to pretend that nobody had anything organized until they came along. Don't store your important media in proprietary formats, or "the cloud."
puppet-master 5y ago
Yes, definitely. In the case of Lightroom, it is preserving your original input photo along with a list of edits and workflows you've applied to it. It also manages a database of preview images, so browsing full resolution albums is fast There are no destructive edits in Lightroom unless you really go out of your way to cause the destruction It also has client-side face recognition / clustering which relies on a local database, indexing by geographic location for GPS-tagged images, etc. Essentially nobody needs Lightroom until they try it, after which it easily becomes impossible to live without and there is no replacement
- hanklazard 5y ago
  > Essentially nobody needs Lightroom until they try it, after which it easily becomes impossible to live without and there is no replacement I’ve tried Dark Table, but I’m afraid you may be correct. Trying to switch after 7 yrs of LR feels really challenging.
  - petepete 5y ago
    I've used Capture One Pro for a similar amount of time and anything else (LR included) feels like a step down. Probably mostly inertia and familiarity by this point.
    - hanklazard 5y ago
      Yeah, my goal is to be able to run my next photo software natively on a linux box, and to my knowledge Capture One is only available on MacOS and Windows. It does look like great software, though.
      - petepete 5y ago
        Yeah, it and Affinity Photo are pretty much the only reason I keep a Windows partition now. I think Darktable looks like a contender but I'd prefer to be able to make it just use Adwaita and look normal.
- 5y ago

mobilemidget 5y ago

"get corrupt on a Synology NAS" omg reading this made me relive that horror I encountered too, of course with pics of the little one. Now I have 3 backups (of which 1 is just an export again of all the pictures in raw) in 2 locations, using Lightroom, I don't trust photos anymore, and yes on apple filesystems.

chromatin 5y ago
Also worried about pictures of the little ones. My solution was for the LR database to live on local SSD, and the library/catalog on an SMB share on a ZFS server, with weekly backup to AWS Glacier. Other than having to reconnect anytime I wake up the machine from sleep, it works pretty well, and I never have worried about corruption. Only flaw in the plan AFAICT is that if a bug in LR or the Mac introduce corruption XFS will happily store the checksummed corrupted file. I should probably add ZFS snapshots.

izacus 5y ago

> Time Machine backups should live on Apple Filesystems. Well, my Time Machine keeps corrupting backups even when targeting the Apple Time Capsule, so I'm not sure if that really helps at all.

simondotau 5y ago

Time Machine backups on remote drives do live inside an Apple file system. They are stored as a mutable disk image. The critical setting for reliability is to use AFP and not SMB. To this end I have two Synology NAS devices—a multi drive unit shared as SMB for general use and a single drive unit shared as AFP for Time Machine. While I do have occasional backup trees go bad (once every two or three years) the backups themselves are still fine and so I just start a fresh one.

op00to 5y ago
THIS. AFP not SMB.
- Jnr 5y ago
  We tried it with AFP as well, did not help, after some time those time machine backups got corrupted. We suspected that maybe AFP writes failed because computers were disconnected from network before buffer was written to the server. But there are no visual indicators for that and we did not want to debug it. We just switched to 3rd party backup solution.
jbverschoor 5y ago
That's not what Apple recommends. Time Machine is pretty shit these days. With their cloud/services strategy, it simply get abandoned. I use time machine, but I don't trust it, so I have other solutions as well
- simondotau 5y ago
  It doesn't matter what Apple recommends—the recommendations are just dead wrong. AFP works and SMB does not. I religiously check backups and I know they are working.
  - vatrikpolker 5y ago
    Slackware is actually the one distro I've succeeded deeply with AFS. One thing that made everything less buggy is to find out what your UID , User ID, was, on the OSX UNIX-compatible system e.g. 1001, let's say, and just make sure the co-responging AFS user/share on the other end shared the same. - No bugged idea why it matters but within linux' AFS implementation paired with OS X it seems to be crucial for some reason, and a lot less headaches. So therefore: user ' osxking ' with UID ' 1001 ' connects best to user ' osxking ' UID ' 1001 ' on your Slackware AFS server. Good luck man! It will work! < 3 Happy AFS'ing, Slackware served me well!

vetinari 5y ago

> It has something to do with the filesystem attributes. Synology can do all the attributes the HFS+/APFS can do. They do not use standard samba *_xattr modules though, they use their own and the result is all the @eaDir stuff. Do not delete it! On the other hand, Time Machine is perfectly capable of damaging its archive on the local drive just fine.

Jnr 5y ago

I did use time machine on external USB HDD and after some time it got corrupted. Happened multiple times over the years. Then I tried Time Machine using AFP and SMB on remote NAS. Those also got corrupted multiple times. The lesson I learned was - do not use TimeMachine. Now I have been using Vorta (UI for Borg) https://github.com/borgbase/vorta https://github.com/borgbase/vorta for a long time and everything is fine.

hanklazard 5y ago
> Now I have been using Vorta (UI for Borg) https://github.com/borgbase/vorta https://github.com/borgbase/vorta for a long time and everything is fine. Same. I really like it. Also sending my backups to https://borgbase.com https://borgbase.com which was relatively painless to setup.

climb_stealth 5y ago

I suggest using Carbon Copy Cloner [0]. I have been bitten by Time Machine corrupting itself and I'm never going back. It works well and they have excellent documentation for pretty much every scenario. And USB backups are bootable. I'm mostly using it with backup to a NAS. [0] https://bombich.com/ https://bombich.com/

submeta 5y ago
Not bootable with latest MacOS anymore, at least not easily. But ignoring that: CCC is an excellent backup solution for MacOS. Have been bitten by Time Machine twice. Still use it, but do not rely on it.
tailspin2019 5y ago
Another vote here for Carbon Copy Cloner. I have a 3x backup combo of Time Machine to local Synology (and I may as well not bother with this), Arq Backup to Arq Cloud (not flawless but I trust it more than Time Machine) and CCC to local USB-C SSD drives. CCC is the only backup I actually trust out of the 3, but it's not automatic and relies on my plugging my backup SSDs in occasionally to clone the whole drive. (Which is more an issue with my workflow than CCC itself).

pembrook 5y ago

Filesystem likely doesn’t have anything to do with it. What’s more likely, is Apple’s notoriously unreliable implementation of SMB causing the problem (and that’s the only option now that AFP support on Mac is dead) I have a Synology DS220+ and connecting to it from a Windows machine vs a MacOS machine is like night and day. On Windows, it literally feels like the NAS is an extension of my local hard drive. Browsing huge directories of thumbnails is snappy, file and folder names appear instantly. It’s a dream. On MacOS, connecting to anything over SMB is a total nightmare. Aside from the constant mounting and unmounting (fun!), it’s just plain unreliable and slow. And people have been complaining about this for years. What’s even more funny, I have a friend who works for Apple and apparently they use NAS storage in some teams and deal with the exact same annoyances! If Apple’s own employees have this problem, it’s hopeless they'll ever fix it for customers. I’d put my money on Apple’s SMB implementation being the root cause of this file corruption issue that has been all over the Reddit Synology user forums lately.

dystopiabreaker 5y ago
Unfortunately, despite being a nightmare, SMB seems to be still be the best option for networked filesystems on macOS. AFP is now officially deprecated/unsupported, and the NFS client seems to be even worse than Samba/SMB. One last hope was macFUSE/sshfs, however this seemed also to be more or less broken when I tried it (extremely slow speeds, issues with disconnecting, etc).
- chromatin 5y ago
  There’s also NFS but it seems to be just as slow as SMB on MacOS.
- tyingq 5y ago
  There's also the option of rsync, though obviously not helpful for live access.
elzbardico 5y ago
Well. SMB is a Microsoft's proprietary protocol. Of course, the windows implementation will be better.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

That last iPhoto update killed my album, and I've lost a shit tonne of photos and videos. And I couldn't even use my backups either because when I open then up, they too needed to read the entire album to do facial recognition etc... took a few days for each backup, but I only knew photos/videos were gone after all drives had been "updated". One of these days, I'll plan on writing my own photo management system, with recoverable indexing, optional facial scanning, and zero phoning home.

cwizou 5y ago

Like many here I had the exact same issue mentioned by the poster, Time Machine on Synology just kept failing, with incredibly unhelpful error messages that basically said, let's trash and backup again. I used AFP which was recommended back then and that worked really well for years (since 2011). But since (maybe) Catalina, issues started creeping up and it would just randomly fail. It used to be once in a while, then it became a weekly occurence before I gave up. Samba isn't better, my mounted shares get randomly disconnected overnight fairly often too (even now on Monterey), and switching from the old Synology to a fresh dedicated NAS machine didn't change a thing. At that point I think in general it's just "local networking" that became less reliable around that time, whether it's some power saving feature, or something else up the stack, I don't know. The only scenario where Time Machine works flawlessly for me is using an external SSD drive for backup, formatted as APFS. At least for now.

tailspin2019 5y ago
Exact same experience. At this stage I think Time Machine is barely fit for purpose for backing up over the network. I've lost days on this issue over the years too. I have always been totally confused as to whether I should be using AFP or SMB (tried both). As others have said, SMB often seems very unreliable, and AFP is supposedly being deprecated... Mounting network shares from my Synology to Mac(s) is never flawless either. As other comments have noted, this experience is very much worse than what it used to be like in Windows (not that I've mounted network shares in Windows for a while).
- cwizou 5y ago
  And same exact experience on mounting shares by the way. When setting up my new NAS last week, I ended up booting a Windows PC to check if Samba was correctly configured because macOS kept throwing weird inscrutable errors semi randomly. I know it's a terrible protocol but it certainly became worse on macOS on the past 3 years-ish.
willyt 5y ago
I have a couple of 6tb usb disks formatted as a Btrfs RAID 1 volume plugged into a Rpi4, it's not the fastest but it has been reliable for over a year. I always make sure I stop the backup before pulling the cord on my laptop though. My wife hadn't been doing this until recently and she has had more problems with both over the network and directly connected usb disks; she has both. At some point I'm going to create a duplicate setup in my house and send Btrfs snapshots over the internet to have an offsite backup, but I haven't got round to this yet. Currently our offsite backup is just taking a laptop home...

wjamesg 5y ago

I have all my photos prior to a certain date in an old iPhoto collection. Can anybody recommend a good way to get photos out of iPhoto without having to manually export thousands of photos?

kall 5y ago
If you‘re ok with just the raw files, right click the library and "Show Package Contents". Then sort by folder size to find the bulk of your photos or create a spotlight query that aggregates all images above a certain size from subfolders. If you edited a lot of photos, it might be messy. If you didn‘t, I think they are all in a folder called Originals, grouped by year then import session.