Fixing Timemachine (works on my computer)

[FredrikJL]

As many people here I use (or try to use) Unraid to run a few SMB share with the purpose of backing up my MacBooks in a secure way. This has caused me much headache in the past. I've read countless posts here and there with limited success. 

 

I run a ASRock C2550D4I with two NICs. One is dedicated for Unraid and one for macvlans. So, no bonding. That's another story, but bonding and macvlans seems to be an issue. 

 

This is what works for me:

1. Run the AFP variant of https://github.com/mbentley/docker-timemachine docker. This works ok, but there's a bit of an overhead with a docker, and the AFP branch of this one is stale. There's a much more maintained SMB version, but I never got that one to work properly. 
2. Just the regular SMB share in Unraid with Timemachine capabilities switched on (duh).

 

The number two above is the big surprise for me, because I've been trying to make it work for a year with no success. Eventually I watched SpaceInvaderOne's video but had no success. But it gave me some inspiration and hope, since he clearly points out to remove any other extra SMB config that can intervene with Timemachine/SMB. My Unraid setup has been around for a long time and is probably full of my mistakes, semi-hacks and old upgrades. 

 

In order to get back to basics. I did the following:

1. Took the array offline. 
2. Made a backup of everything in /boot/config
3. Went into /boot/config/shares and removed all configs for old shares that aren't used anymore. Also removed their respective directories.
4. I also removed all timemachine shares. (Some of the old backups where moved to other shares.)

5. Removed everything from SMB-extras.conf according to SpaceInvaderOne's instructions. 

6. Completely deleted /boot/config/share.cfg to rid myself of any previous mistakes/hacks. 

7. Restarted with the array offline.

8. With the array offline, checked the Settings page for SMB. Verified everything according to basic defaults and saved. This showed to be important, because now a new share.cfg file is created on /boot/config with the default settings. 

9. Cranked up the array. 

10. Created a new timemachine share, with no size limit as public. 

11. Tried to mount and use it for Timemachine. 

12. Success!

 

Why did it work this time? I have no idea...

Will it work on your machine? I have no idea. It works on my machine. But I was quite thorough when cleaning out old shares, tweaks, tunes and misconfigs. Take it for what it is. This might also work for you. Or not. 

 

share.cfg timemachine.cfg

[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.

 

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.