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Have recent versions of macOS fixed the reliability of Time Machine over network (especially over Wi-Fi)? It used to be that after a while (varies from a coupl

Have recent versions of macOS fixed the reliability of Time Machine over network (especially over Wi-Fi)? It used to be that after a while (varies from a couple of weeks to months) Time Machine would complain that the spare disk image on the NAS was corrupted and you'd have to start from scratch, which completely defeats the purpose of backup.

dividedbyzero 4y ago
I've been using the same (Synology) share for years with not a single corruption (that I know of). I've set TimeMachine to only run at night though when the laptop tends to sit on my desk where it has ethernet.
- tailspin2019 4y ago
  Interesting, I have two Macs backing up via Time Machine to a Synology (over ethernet) and both have regularly suffered corruptions where they have to restart the backup from scratch again. It's infuriating. Were there any specific tweaks you made to your setup to make this reliable? I also wonder if the amount of backup data makes a difference. I have tended to use Time Machine to backup pretty much my whole drive. I wonder if it's more reliable when backing up smaller amounts of data perhaps...
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    I have it do my entire drive and frequently throw 100+ GB of video files onto my main hard drive that get backed up within the hour.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    Just the scheduling via TimeMachineEditor so it only does backups between 2AM and 8AM or so, mostly because the Synology is audible during backups and I find that annoying when I'm in the room. I don't backup over VPN or the like, just via the local LAN (if I'm not at home, no backup gets made). As to amount of data, I run it on my whole drive with a few excluded directories, that's 700-ish gb of non-excluded data and the backup on the Synology is 1.6TB. I've recently migrated the TimeMachine backup from an older Intel MBP to a new M2 Air (I wasn't even aware you could do that) and that seems to have worked just fine as well.
    - riobard 4y ago
      I'm wondering… have you ever tried to restore from that TM backup?
      - dividedbyzero 4y ago
        Not from that one. I've restored once from a TM backup on an external HDD (worked well), but from this one I've only had to restore individual files (always worked). It's kind of hard to test a restore of 700gb of data on a laptop with a 1tb SSD, and since this is my personal laptop it has tons and tons of documents, photos, files for projects, tons data in various apps ... I wouldn't know how to verify more than a small sample of it all.
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  I've had good experience with Synology and Time machine despite usually using wifi. I've seen corruption only once in the last 5 years across 4 different machines.
_cenw 4y ago
No. TM is fast/reliable on local drives because of APFS magic. They don't seem to have touched the implementation that uses SMB in any meaningful way since the AirPort Time Capsule was discontinued.
- crest 4y ago
  Have your tried TimeMachine on sparse images on network file systems or iSCSI targets (or did Apple finally kill off all initiators for macOS?) in recent macOS versions?
  - Asmod4n 4y ago
    Can’t do full system restores from iSCSI
    - anecdotal1 4y ago
      if the iSCSI disk is its own physical disk you can just pull it from your NAS, plug into a USB dock, and plug it into your Mac
      - Asmod4n 4y ago
        That’s defeating the purpose why you want to use iSCSI. Just get a usb drive and back up to that then.
        jiveturkey 4y ago
        Not at all. It's typically far more convenient to use a network available drive for backup. You rarely need to restore and even rarer to do a full system restore.
  - xoa 4y ago
    >or did Apple finally kill off all initiators for macOS I would assume that'd work fine, because I run my main workstations and a server full time with my home folder and various data living off APFS or HFS formatted iSCSI targets served over 10 gigabit from a TrueNAS system. I haven't upgraded to macOS 13 yet since I tend to be a lot more conservative these days about Mac upgrades than I used to, but Xtend SAN at least still works beautifully under macOS 12. I really, REALLY hope Apple doesn't remove that capability without a native alternative (or at least officially sanctioned way to do the same thing). Of course in that specific scenario Time Machine is of limited value (and I don't use it) since why bother when you can just use ZFS snapshots on the NAS side instead. TM has always been too flaky for me to feel comfortable with anyway. Still, could be powerful in some instances, particularly when combined with a hardware gadget setup. Which leads to a response to sibling thread: >Asmod4n 3 hours ago: Can’t do full system restores from iSCSI Linux has kernel support for USB gadgets that can emulate mass storage devices, and that means you can actually rig up a little cheap embedded board to translate iSCSI into something that will look to anything else like a standard external USB hard drive. See for example [0]. Like the author there I use it to work around issues with appliances like consoles or the like that don't know how to natively deal with a lot of network stuff, but it's a pretty powerful tool if you've got a good NAS and LAN setup regardless. Get your full network storage flexibility, snapshots, data integrity and so on that pretty much anything ever with a USB port can utilize natively. ---- 0: https://matt.olan.me/making-a-piscsi-usb-drive-part-1/ https://matt.olan.me/making-a-piscsi-usb-drive-part-1/
savolai 4y ago
I've experienced this too. My wifi isn't terribly reliable.
xenadu02 4y ago
I've been using FreeNAS/TrueNAS for a year or so with no issues using multiple Mac machines. It's entirely over SAMBA shares. I set the server up to give each user their own unique TM backup disk.
- wil421 4y ago
  What’s you pool setup for this? How much space do you set aside for each disk?
  - xenadu02 4y ago
    I have it setup to share the space; I have a TM dataset (generic not AFP, Time Machine, or whatever). Then I have a SAMBA per-user Time Machine share on top of that. The first time the user connects from the Mac it creates a child dataset for that user with the relevant ACLs to keep them isolated. A quote forces each client to prune its history. The pool itself is 8x12TB Toshiba enterprise drives. I'll have to check what pool config I used but I did add multiple NVME SSDs for SLOG and ARC. Whichever one is the important one is actually mirrored across the NVME drives for redundancy while the other partition only exists on one NVME drive, which was mildly annoying to configure. I'm still not sure I made the "best" choices for the ZFS config - there are many knobs to turn.
- rtp4me 4y ago
  Same here. 3 Mac Laptops connected to my TrueNAS server (v13) over wifi. Each laptop has its own separate ZFS dataset. Works great. No issues thus far. That said, I have not tried to restore from TimeMachine yet. I need to try that this week.
- riobard 4y ago
  Interesting. Could you please share the Samba config for the Time Machine shares? And over what medium do your Mac machines connect to the NAS? Wired or wireless?
  - xenadu02 4y ago
    I did not customize the Samba config, just accepted the defaults. Connections are a mix of wired and wireless. The NAS box has 10GbE to my UDMPro. See my other comment for how the datasets are setup. I forgot to mention that I applied a quota to force each client to prune its history to avoid consuming all disk space.
jbverschoor 4y ago
Yeah it's been performant (wifi), but I use TimeMachineEditor, so it will only backup to my NAS once or twice per day. In terms of stability, I haven't had a problem with TM on a NAS for a few years, but yeah the corruption is why I used to use CCC instead.
atmosx 4y ago
hm, what reliability issue? I'm using ZFS + netatalk in Gentoo server since 2015 as a backup server for 5 macOS devices without problems.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is basically my setup but isn’t samba + apple doodads and it’s been working fine for years. Early on I had an issue with over provisioning the ZFS slice or whatever but that was resolved.
furyg3 4y ago
I have been running Time Machine backups to a Synology (via SMB, exclusively over wifi except for the initial backup) for years and years. I ran into this issue only once, but it was after moving the backups around and changing the shares on the synology (so may have been my fault). So far I've found it to be pretty reliable.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  Ditto, just in my case using ASUSTOR. I think the reliability issues aren't too bad especially if you use in the built-in Time Machine support in most NAS OSes these days.
- aeturnum 4y ago
  I also use a Synology with Time Machine. It does seem pretty functional, but I regularly run into weirdness associated with it (some backups fail for unclear reasons, sometimes I can't ls my /Volumes directory while the TM backup is mounted, etc). It has the feel of an under-maintained system.
netruk44 4y ago
I've had this same issue with my Synology. Randomly Time Machine would stop doing backups because the destination was "corrupted". I've given up on Time Machine over SMB and I'm using Borg + Vorta for my backups. It has the benefit of being readable by any other Linux machine, too.
- memco 4y ago
  I too was bitten by Synology corrupted TM backups over SMB on WiFi and have stopped trying to back up since I have not found any good documentation on the cause or solution. Where do you store the backups? Did you change to a hardwired connection?
  - netruk44 4y ago
    I haven't changed anything other than swapping out TM for Borg. The backups still reside on the Synology (Borg is available on SynoCommunity: https://synocommunity.com/package/borgbackup https://synocommunity.com/package/borgbackup), and I still backup over WiFi. The Vorta (Mac UI for Borg) client and user experience isn't Apple levels of polished like TM, but I've made it work and I'm happy enough with it. I'm not sure what causes TM to start considering the volume corrupted, because I believe at one point I switched over to a hardwired connection, but still saw a corrupted volume. I compared that to Borg, which doesn't flinch if you SIGKILL the process mid-backup, and will basically just pick up from where it left off if you start another one. I saw no reason to continue with TM at all.
CharlesW 4y ago
> Have recent versions of macOS fixed the reliability of Time Machine over network (especially over Wi-Fi)? FWIW, I've done Time Machine backups over Wi-Fi to a QNAP NAS for several years and have never run into this issue. I'm just using default settings for everything.
n8henrie 4y ago
No. Mine just borked again last month. Happens once or twice per year. Thankfully this is not my first rodeo. My Time Machine over SMB on ZFS setup has zfs-auto-snapshot set up, so I was able to roll back to a snapshot a month or so prior, which Time Machine happily verified, and it resumed backups without a hitch (keeping several years worth of backups intact).
pridkett 4y ago
Hasn’t happened to me recently, probably about 16 months since the last time it claimed everything needed to be reset. Fortunately, I found I can put the Time Machine archive on btrfs and use snapshotting to roll back a day when this happens. Works great. I also found increasing the band size to 50MB from the default of 8MB made things work “better”, but I lack concrete empirical evidence.

dividedbyzero 4y ago

I've been using the same (Synology) share for years with not a single corruption (that I know of). I've set TimeMachine to only run at night though when the laptop tends to sit on my desk where it has ethernet.

tailspin2019 4y ago
Interesting, I have two Macs backing up via Time Machine to a Synology (over ethernet) and both have regularly suffered corruptions where they have to restart the backup from scratch again. It's infuriating. Were there any specific tweaks you made to your setup to make this reliable? I also wonder if the amount of backup data makes a difference. I have tended to use Time Machine to backup pretty much my whole drive. I wonder if it's more reliable when backing up smaller amounts of data perhaps...
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  I have it do my entire drive and frequently throw 100+ GB of video files onto my main hard drive that get backed up within the hour.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  Just the scheduling via TimeMachineEditor so it only does backups between 2AM and 8AM or so, mostly because the Synology is audible during backups and I find that annoying when I'm in the room. I don't backup over VPN or the like, just via the local LAN (if I'm not at home, no backup gets made). As to amount of data, I run it on my whole drive with a few excluded directories, that's 700-ish gb of non-excluded data and the backup on the Synology is 1.6TB. I've recently migrated the TimeMachine backup from an older Intel MBP to a new M2 Air (I wasn't even aware you could do that) and that seems to have worked just fine as well.
  - riobard 4y ago
    I'm wondering… have you ever tried to restore from that TM backup?
    - dividedbyzero 4y ago
      Not from that one. I've restored once from a TM backup on an external HDD (worked well), but from this one I've only had to restore individual files (always worked). It's kind of hard to test a restore of 700gb of data on a laptop with a 1tb SSD, and since this is my personal laptop it has tons and tons of documents, photos, files for projects, tons data in various apps ... I wouldn't know how to verify more than a small sample of it all.
nicolas_t 4y ago
I've had good experience with Synology and Time machine despite usually using wifi. I've seen corruption only once in the last 5 years across 4 different machines.

_cenw 4y ago

No. TM is fast/reliable on local drives because of APFS magic. They don't seem to have touched the implementation that uses SMB in any meaningful way since the AirPort Time Capsule was discontinued.

crest 4y ago
Have your tried TimeMachine on sparse images on network file systems or iSCSI targets (or did Apple finally kill off all initiators for macOS?) in recent macOS versions?
- Asmod4n 4y ago
  Can’t do full system restores from iSCSI
  - anecdotal1 4y ago
    if the iSCSI disk is its own physical disk you can just pull it from your NAS, plug into a USB dock, and plug it into your Mac
    - Asmod4n 4y ago
      That’s defeating the purpose why you want to use iSCSI. Just get a usb drive and back up to that then.
      - jiveturkey 4y ago
        Not at all. It's typically far more convenient to use a network available drive for backup. You rarely need to restore and even rarer to do a full system restore.
- xoa 4y ago
  >or did Apple finally kill off all initiators for macOS I would assume that'd work fine, because I run my main workstations and a server full time with my home folder and various data living off APFS or HFS formatted iSCSI targets served over 10 gigabit from a TrueNAS system. I haven't upgraded to macOS 13 yet since I tend to be a lot more conservative these days about Mac upgrades than I used to, but Xtend SAN at least still works beautifully under macOS 12. I really, REALLY hope Apple doesn't remove that capability without a native alternative (or at least officially sanctioned way to do the same thing). Of course in that specific scenario Time Machine is of limited value (and I don't use it) since why bother when you can just use ZFS snapshots on the NAS side instead. TM has always been too flaky for me to feel comfortable with anyway. Still, could be powerful in some instances, particularly when combined with a hardware gadget setup. Which leads to a response to sibling thread: >Asmod4n 3 hours ago: Can’t do full system restores from iSCSI Linux has kernel support for USB gadgets that can emulate mass storage devices, and that means you can actually rig up a little cheap embedded board to translate iSCSI into something that will look to anything else like a standard external USB hard drive. See for example [0]. Like the author there I use it to work around issues with appliances like consoles or the like that don't know how to natively deal with a lot of network stuff, but it's a pretty powerful tool if you've got a good NAS and LAN setup regardless. Get your full network storage flexibility, snapshots, data integrity and so on that pretty much anything ever with a USB port can utilize natively. ---- 0: https://matt.olan.me/making-a-piscsi-usb-drive-part-1/ https://matt.olan.me/making-a-piscsi-usb-drive-part-1/

savolai 4y ago

I've experienced this too. My wifi isn't terribly reliable.

xenadu02 4y ago

I've been using FreeNAS/TrueNAS for a year or so with no issues using multiple Mac machines. It's entirely over SAMBA shares. I set the server up to give each user their own unique TM backup disk.

wil421 4y ago
What’s you pool setup for this? How much space do you set aside for each disk?
- xenadu02 4y ago
  I have it setup to share the space; I have a TM dataset (generic not AFP, Time Machine, or whatever). Then I have a SAMBA per-user Time Machine share on top of that. The first time the user connects from the Mac it creates a child dataset for that user with the relevant ACLs to keep them isolated. A quote forces each client to prune its history. The pool itself is 8x12TB Toshiba enterprise drives. I'll have to check what pool config I used but I did add multiple NVME SSDs for SLOG and ARC. Whichever one is the important one is actually mirrored across the NVME drives for redundancy while the other partition only exists on one NVME drive, which was mildly annoying to configure. I'm still not sure I made the "best" choices for the ZFS config - there are many knobs to turn.
rtp4me 4y ago
Same here. 3 Mac Laptops connected to my TrueNAS server (v13) over wifi. Each laptop has its own separate ZFS dataset. Works great. No issues thus far. That said, I have not tried to restore from TimeMachine yet. I need to try that this week.
riobard 4y ago
Interesting. Could you please share the Samba config for the Time Machine shares? And over what medium do your Mac machines connect to the NAS? Wired or wireless?
- xenadu02 4y ago
  I did not customize the Samba config, just accepted the defaults. Connections are a mix of wired and wireless. The NAS box has 10GbE to my UDMPro. See my other comment for how the datasets are setup. I forgot to mention that I applied a quota to force each client to prune its history to avoid consuming all disk space.

jbverschoor 4y ago

Yeah it's been performant (wifi), but I use TimeMachineEditor, so it will only backup to my NAS once or twice per day. In terms of stability, I haven't had a problem with TM on a NAS for a few years, but yeah the corruption is why I used to use CCC instead.

atmosx 4y ago

hm, what reliability issue? I'm using ZFS + netatalk in Gentoo server since 2015 as a backup server for 5 macOS devices without problems.

bombcar 4y ago
This is basically my setup but isn’t samba + apple doodads and it’s been working fine for years. Early on I had an issue with over provisioning the ZFS slice or whatever but that was resolved.

furyg3 4y ago

I have been running Time Machine backups to a Synology (via SMB, exclusively over wifi except for the initial backup) for years and years. I ran into this issue only once, but it was after moving the backups around and changing the shares on the synology (so may have been my fault). So far I've found it to be pretty reliable.

geerlingguy 4y ago
Ditto, just in my case using ASUSTOR. I think the reliability issues aren't too bad especially if you use in the built-in Time Machine support in most NAS OSes these days.
aeturnum 4y ago
I also use a Synology with Time Machine. It does seem pretty functional, but I regularly run into weirdness associated with it (some backups fail for unclear reasons, sometimes I can't ls my /Volumes directory while the TM backup is mounted, etc). It has the feel of an under-maintained system.

netruk44 4y ago

I've had this same issue with my Synology. Randomly Time Machine would stop doing backups because the destination was "corrupted". I've given up on Time Machine over SMB and I'm using Borg + Vorta for my backups. It has the benefit of being readable by any other Linux machine, too.

memco 4y ago
I too was bitten by Synology corrupted TM backups over SMB on WiFi and have stopped trying to back up since I have not found any good documentation on the cause or solution. Where do you store the backups? Did you change to a hardwired connection?
- netruk44 4y ago
  I haven't changed anything other than swapping out TM for Borg. The backups still reside on the Synology (Borg is available on SynoCommunity: https://synocommunity.com/package/borgbackup https://synocommunity.com/package/borgbackup), and I still backup over WiFi. The Vorta (Mac UI for Borg) client and user experience isn't Apple levels of polished like TM, but I've made it work and I'm happy enough with it. I'm not sure what causes TM to start considering the volume corrupted, because I believe at one point I switched over to a hardwired connection, but still saw a corrupted volume. I compared that to Borg, which doesn't flinch if you SIGKILL the process mid-backup, and will basically just pick up from where it left off if you start another one. I saw no reason to continue with TM at all.

CharlesW 4y ago

> Have recent versions of macOS fixed the reliability of Time Machine over network (especially over Wi-Fi)? FWIW, I've done Time Machine backups over Wi-Fi to a QNAP NAS for several years and have never run into this issue. I'm just using default settings for everything.

n8henrie 4y ago

No. Mine just borked again last month. Happens once or twice per year. Thankfully this is not my first rodeo. My Time Machine over SMB on ZFS setup has zfs-auto-snapshot set up, so I was able to roll back to a snapshot a month or so prior, which Time Machine happily verified, and it resumed backups without a hitch (keeping several years worth of backups intact).

pridkett 4y ago

Hasn’t happened to me recently, probably about 16 months since the last time it claimed everything needed to be reset. Fortunately, I found I can put the Time Machine archive on btrfs and use snapshotting to roll back a day when this happens. Works great. I also found increasing the band size to 50MB from the default of 8MB made things work “better”, but I lack concrete empirical evidence.