4 ms·

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 lap

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.

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.