Officially give up on TimeMachine

[DivideBy0]

Since my upgrade to 6.11.1 my TimeMachine stoped working, completely for the Ventura OSX, and very unstable for the other  OSX versions. I have 7 Macs in my house. I ended up resurrecting an old MacMini with a 10TB drive attached as TimeMachine share and got it all back in running.

Really really disappointed with this whole affair as it worked rock solid before 6.11.  I tried absolutely everything for months, and nothing worked.  One of the main reason I moved to UnRaid is because the ability to use Time Machine. And to rub it in, FreeNAS works just fine with TimeMachine  

[Jazer]

+1 // Same here... Moved from OMV to unRAID and Timemachine is so unreliable. The good thing, I'm on a "trial" license and I will not purchase until this is fixed!

 

Timemachine is one of the most important features for me.

 

Any luck on fixing it?

[Hoopster]

5 hours ago, Jazer said:

+1 // Same here... Moved from OMV to unRAID and Timemachine is so unreliable. The good thing, I'm on a "trial" license and I will not purchase until this is fixed!
 
Timemachine is one of the most important features for me.
 
Any luck on fixing it?

Unfortunately, Time Machine support in UnRAID was the least important feature listed in a recent user survey. -2773 votes put it well below the other options. Of course this does not mean that it is not needed by UnRAID users just that most responding to the survey do not think it is high on the list of potential uses for development time.

Who knows how much those results will impact future development efforts but it was not a great result for Time Machine fans.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Edited February 20, 2023 by Hoopster

[sreknob]

For those that time machine backups are important, it does seem that the TimeMachine docker application works.

It's not native and an additional step, but some appear to have found it useful

 

[apandey]

I have it working fine on 6.11.5 with simply setting up timemachine options in share settings 

 

When I initially set it up, it kept disconnecting on initial backup and for a couple of days, it felt as if the backup will never complete. But then, I gave it time and it did complete eventually in few more days. After initial backup, it has been keeping up fine. So I think it's some issue with backing up large chunks in one go

[hendrst1]

19 hours ago, apandey said:

I have it working fine on 6.11.5 with simply setting up timemachine options in share settings 

 

When I initially set it up, it kept disconnecting on initial backup and for a couple of days, it felt as if the backup will never complete. But then, I gave it time and it did complete eventually in few more days. After initial backup, it has been keeping up fine. So I think it's some issue with backing up large chunks in one go

Please share your options because that was certainly not my experience backing up two M2 machines to an Unraid share.   In my case the initial time machine backup worked but then it wouldn't do any incremental hourly updates after that.   Moreover, clicking on the time machine share in Mac OS Finder immediately locked up Finder requiring a reboot.  I couldn't even delete the contents of the time machine share from Mac OS; had to go to a Windows machine to do that.    So not a happy experience.

 

I am not sure Time Machine is worth the trouble.  It has never been reliable over the years I have used it unless direct attached to your machine; and even then it eventually gets corrupted.   I hear it is more reliable since Apple implemented apfs file system but I have my doubts.

[apandey]

15 minutes ago, hendrst1 said:

Please share your option

All I have is a cache only share. I simply did the following in smb settings 

 

User access is read/write for a single timemachine user. 

 

18 minutes ago, hendrst1 said:

am not sure Time Machine is worth the trouble

I will perhaps agree. Although I have it set up for at least 10 years, I have never needed to restore anything from it. Whenever I needed to interact with it, it was to deal with fixing it from some outage. I have used synology as a target in the past and it was same. To me it's just a secondary backup, just in case. I mainly depend on my more traditional backups which work across Mac and other systems

[hendrst1]

So you selected YES for case sensitive; I left it on AUTO. 

[Jazer]

To me it seems also that having multiple timemachine backups on the same share is resposnible for this issue. Maybe also the mover mixes up stuff by destroying the integrity.

I'm currently trying to use one machine per share, maybe this will be more stable.

 

And yes - moving large amount of data (initial or large backups), lead to disconnectes.

[apandey]

1 hour ago, Jazer said:

To me it seems also that having multiple timemachine backups on the same share is resposnible for this issue. Maybe also the mover mixes up stuff by destroying the integrity.

I have 2 macs backing up to same share. But my share is on a dedicated backup pool with “Only” setting, so the mover never touches it

[itimpi]

11 hours ago, hendrst1 said:

So you selected YES for case sensitive; I left it on AUTO. 

MacOS is a case sensitive OS so a Yes value seems appropriate (and is also more efficient at the Samba level).

[hendrst1]

I recreated the Time Machine share with YES selected as case sensitive.  Still same result: Initial backup worked fine but then no subsequent reconnection for incrementals.  Yet, I can connect a drive to my old Airport Extreme router and TM backups work fine.   

 

Oh well, at least this time I could use the Unraid File Manager to remove the files for easy share deletion.

[Jazer]

No chance this will work relaiable... I've invested a lot of hours with diffrent settigns any non of them worked out.

 

Now I'm giving the Timemachine Docker App a chance... and it looks very promising.

[Jazer]

I can confirm that timemachine with docker works flawless, even with mover... unless mover and tm don't run at same time.

[Simon Edelmann]

I am struggling with TimeMachine aswell. Have tried TimeMachine docker a few months ago, with no success either.

No I am using some strange workaround to get my backups running, but I have to do that manually all the time. Would be interested to know if this is working for anyone else!

 

[murkus]

I had given up on it half a year ago, after upgrading to 6.11. it was broken, so I thought. I gave it a shot now with 6.12.2 with what I think made the substantial difference: I now use a "disk share" instead of a regular "user share". Disk shares may not yet be enabled on your unraid installation and this can be done in "Global share settings". The disk share has a size limit for timemachine. I don't see any substantial drawbacks of using a disk share as compared to a user share, if you plan to have you macOS backups all on one disk anyway. The SHFS user file system turns out to come with a lot of performance overhead and I have stopped using it for any shares for backup solutions.

 

I am using the unraid TimeMachine that is included with the OS, not the TimeMachine container. I had tried the container in the past and that was also not successful for me. I removed all custom tweaks for SMB, I am using the stock SMB config that 6.12 comes with.

 

TimeMachine now is not perfect, but it works: The inital backup stopped like 4-5 times and I had to restart it. The whole process took 2-3 days until the initial backup did conclude successfully. Starting new differential backups works fine.

 

I don't know yet whether the verification will be successful, as it is currently running. If it fails I will provide an update here.