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Time Machine over NAS has always been unstable for me. As you experienced, my backup would be regularly corrupted and would need to restart. Alternatively, a

Time Machine over NAS has always been unstable for me. As you experienced, my backup would be regularly corrupted and would need to restart. Alternatively, a normal <10G backup could take in excess of 24h. I eventually gave up on the NAS and now backup to external drives at home. This site has excellent articles on Time Machine - scroll down to Time Machine Problems: https://eclecticlight.co/mac-troubleshooting-summary/ https://eclecticlight.co/mac-troubleshooting-summary/

jdminhbg 3y ago
I had the exact same problem and ended up with the same solution. I know people who have had somewhat better experiences backing up to something like a Synology, but the $Xk investment wasn't worth it for me without also needing it for big file storage or media serving or whatever.
- nottorp 3y ago
  > backing up to something like a Synology How about QNAP? I happen to have one gathering dust, if you can reliably Time Machine to it i'd plug it in.
bobleeswagger 3y ago
There are some quirks to setting up SMB so Time Machine is happy, but I have had great success with ZFS+SMB hosting my TM backups. Have been running for a little over a month and nothing is corrupt. Self hosting is still somewhat hard, I don't blame you for bailing on something so critical to uptime in the first place.
MikeKusold 3y ago
My time machine share is backed by ZFS. I have a separate dataset for each laptop, with snapshots retained for 30 days. As long as I know roughly the last time the backup worked, I can restore that snapshot so I don't need to start fresh.
- testfoobar 3y ago
  I had the same - ZFS across four drives with separate dataset and samba shares for each machine in my house. It would work and yes, I could rollback to a working snapshot. But it wasn't a set and forget system.
cyberax 3y ago
Time Machine has improved a lot after the switch to APFS. Mostly because it supports full snapshots, with an easy way to get the difference between two snapshots. The previous HFS+ version relied on directory hardlinks that were notoriously buggy and easy to corrupt. The difference computation also required basically recursively walking the entire tree and comparing the directory change times, with each lookup requiring a network round-trip.

jdminhbg 3y ago

I had the exact same problem and ended up with the same solution. I know people who have had somewhat better experiences backing up to something like a Synology, but the $Xk investment wasn't worth it for me without also needing it for big file storage or media serving or whatever.

nottorp 3y ago
> backing up to something like a Synology How about QNAP? I happen to have one gathering dust, if you can reliably Time Machine to it i'd plug it in.

bobleeswagger 3y ago

There are some quirks to setting up SMB so Time Machine is happy, but I have had great success with ZFS+SMB hosting my TM backups. Have been running for a little over a month and nothing is corrupt. Self hosting is still somewhat hard, I don't blame you for bailing on something so critical to uptime in the first place.

MikeKusold 3y ago

My time machine share is backed by ZFS. I have a separate dataset for each laptop, with snapshots retained for 30 days. As long as I know roughly the last time the backup worked, I can restore that snapshot so I don't need to start fresh.

testfoobar 3y ago
I had the same - ZFS across four drives with separate dataset and samba shares for each machine in my house. It would work and yes, I could rollback to a working snapshot. But it wasn't a set and forget system.

cyberax 3y ago

Time Machine has improved a lot after the switch to APFS. Mostly because it supports full snapshots, with an easy way to get the difference between two snapshots. The previous HFS+ version relied on directory hardlinks that were notoriously buggy and easy to corrupt. The difference computation also required basically recursively walking the entire tree and comparing the directory change times, with each lookup requiring a network round-trip.