Time Machine over SMB (Mac OS Sierra)


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Hi All,

 

I just finished building a NAS and and debating between freenas and unraid. The deciding factor is needing to be able to create time machine shares for two macbook pro's running mojave, is this feature available yet and if not when will 6.7 with this feature most likely be released?

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17 minutes ago, nanoblock said:

Hi All,

 

I just finished building a NAS and and debating between freenas and unraid. The deciding factor is needing to be able to create time machine shares for two macbook pro's running mojave, is this feature available yet and if not when will 6.7 with this feature most likely be released?

It is currently available in the 6.7RC. These are mostly stable but you might not want to try them if your server is mission critical.

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22 minutes ago, nanoblock said:

Hi All,

 

I just finished building a NAS and and debating between freenas and unraid. The deciding factor is needing to be able to create time machine shares for two macbook pro's running mojave, is this feature available yet and if not when will 6.7 with this feature most likely be released?

Time Machine works in Unraid, out of the box with AFP.  If you want SMB in anything publicly released, just need a few tweaks as mentioned in this thread.  I'm currently backing up my Mac to Unraid over SMB with version 6.6.7.  Otherwise my understanding is that Time Machine over SMB is supported in 6.7.0.

 

I 100% recommend you get Unraid!  I had a QNAP before this and let me tell you, building my own machine has been awesome and Unraid has never skipped a beat! Going on about 14 months now since my build.  I've got a bunch of dockers and a gaming VM with an nvidia card passed through.  Friends can easily stream through Plex including transcode (hardware transcode with Intel GPU) and I don't notice any hit in my gaming.  I never imagined it could be this easy to have a server and gaming rig all in one!

Edited by nickp85
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Thanks for the info! Sorry for my ignorance but what is "RC" and i don't see 6.7RC for download anywhere how would I get it? The server I have has an ASRock C2550D4I motherboard, 2 x Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3/DDR3L-1600MT/s (PC3-12800) DR x8 ECC UDIMM, 4 x 4TB 7200rpm hardrives all in a U-NAS NSC-400. I am looking to use the server to download and play a couple of plex streams, 2 x time machine backups and photo and doc storage, does this hardware seem sufficient? I am a little concerned about the cpu but seems like this board was recommended for NAS builds a lot.

The thing i was concerned about using unraid vs freenas is that in freenas it seems like you can create separate datasets and shares for two separate time machine backups and i don't see really how you would do that with unraid, otherwise it seems like unraid is way more friendly for my needs.

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On 2/28/2019 at 9:34 PM, nanoblock said:

Thanks for the info! Sorry for my ignorance but what is "RC" and i don't see 6.7RC for download anywhere how would I get it? The server I have has an ASRock C2550D4I motherboard, 2 x Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3/DDR3L-1600MT/s (PC3-12800) DR x8 ECC UDIMM, 4 x 4TB 7200rpm hardrives all in a U-NAS NSC-400. I am looking to use the server to download and play a couple of plex streams, 2 x time machine backups and photo and doc storage, does this hardware seem sufficient? I am a little concerned about the cpu but seems like this board was recommended for NAS builds a lot.

The thing i was concerned about using unraid vs freenas is that in freenas it seems like you can create separate datasets and shares for two separate time machine backups and i don't see really how you would do that with unraid, otherwise it seems like unraid is way more friendly for my needs.

You can set up multiple shares to use with Time Machine.  I don't see why not.  Just make two shares set up for Time Machine.

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Thank You, will I have to wait until 6.7 in order to do this via smb or is there a way I can do it via SMB now?

If you are running a 6.6.x version, goto tools, update os, where the barn x says stable, click the dropdown and select next and install 6.7rc5

 

 

Sent from my iPhone Xs Max using Tapatalk Pro

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OK thanks I am going to install 6.7rc5. I am setting up unraid for the first time and was waiting for all my hardware to come in to do the build and wanted to get a head start on understanding everything before I set things up incorrectly. 

 

Last question I have on the time machine topic is what people have as a best practice for time machine backup. I am thinking set up two shares,  timemachine1 for my one machine and timemachiine2 for the other machine. Then have two users timemachine1user, timemachine2user and then mount the respective shares and put in the credentials. Now the part I seem to have trouble with is, how do i have the timemachine share of each machine mount automatically when the computer is booted so that it will just do its backups without intervention from me of having to always mount the drives etc.....  

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7 minutes ago, nanoblock said:

Now the part I seem to have trouble with is, how do i have the timemachine share of each machine mount automatically when the computer is booted so that it will just do its backups without intervention from me of having to always mount the drives etc..... 

Time Machine will handle that. You’ll have to manually mount the share the first time probably, but after the first backup is complete you won’t have to worry about it.

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4 hours ago, nanoblock said:

OK thanks I am going to install 6.7rc5. I am setting up unraid for the first time and was waiting for all my hardware to come in to do the build and wanted to get a head start on understanding everything before I set things up incorrectly. 

 

Last question I have on the time machine topic is what people have as a best practice for time machine backup. I am thinking set up two shares,  timemachine1 for my one machine and timemachiine2 for the other machine. Then have two users timemachine1user, timemachine2user and then mount the respective shares and put in the credentials. Now the part I seem to have trouble with is, how do i have the timemachine share of each machine mount automatically when the computer is booted so that it will just do its backups without intervention from me of having to always mount the drives etc.....  

Just say add time machine and it should show up on your local network. No manual mapping. Time Machine will connect automatically when trying to back up.

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  • 2 weeks later...

hi all, im on 6.7rc5 and can't get TM to work over SMB. its showing up and I can login but while adding, its saying something like: "The network backup disk does not support the required capabilities"

 

what steps do I have to configure manually before its working with the 6.7. final release? 

 

thnx in advance

Edited by phenomeus
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2 hours ago, phenomeus said:

hey, thanks but I did that and still, not working. its exported and visible but not connecting at the end 

 

its just creating this file in the share: .com.apple.timemachine.supported

If you do a google search you’ll see that this issue is somewhat common with time Machine. There are various convoluted methods for getting TM to work with this error. Perhaps at some point Apple will fix the problem.

Edited by wgstarks
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I have two machines backing up to Time Machine using 6.7.0 RC5 just fine. 

Make sure you start a Brand new backup and share with the above settings and it "should work". There are several reports of people attempting to change settings after the first backup and it's failing. 

 

I basically have two shares on the same drive. 

TimeMachineLaptop set at 300GB

TimeMachineDesktop set at 1TB

 

I used the above settings and simply pointed each machine to its own Share and let it go. Its been going pretty smoothly for at least 5days. 

 

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I set this up as described (after updating to 6.7rc5) and it is working decently for two MacBooks in my house. The backups seem extremely slow, but they are working! Really glad to see this added.

 

 

On 3/19/2019 at 6:13 AM, LammeN3rd said:

I've been using it for a while now and it works great!!!

 

don't forget to turn it on for the server and share though.

 

image.thumb.png.b8e2ae00fede48e929476f74029a1b1d.png

image.thumb.png.62e88df29f33114ce57c543574bcb875.png

 

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On 3/19/2019 at 3:13 AM, LammeN3rd said:

I've been using it for a while now and it works great!!!

 

don't forget to turn it on for the server and share though.

 

image.thumb.png.b8e2ae00fede48e929476f74029a1b1d.png

image.thumb.png.62e88df29f33114ce57c543574bcb875.png

 

That Enhanced OS X interoperability setting was created because when first experimenting with the so-called "fruit" settings (for better OS X support), some users reported problems in normal access via Windows.  If no one reports problems with this set to Yes we will probably get rid of this setting in the future.

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I don't have any windows clients connecting to my Unraid, only Mac over SMB and Linux over NFS so can't speak to that point.

Time-Machine over SMB works really great though!

 

I've been using it for a few weeks now with two MacBooks and have not had any issues.

I did try the AFP option before but that was terribly slow (about 1/3th the speed I'm getting with SMB) and even worse forced me to delete the backup and start over all the time making it unusable.

 

Thank you very much Tom!!

Edited by LammeN3rd
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tried everything by now… not working. same odd error "The network backup disk does not support the required capabilities"

 

even a freshly installed Mojave macOS on another macbook gets the same error. so I assume I have to search here at unraid for the solution. did exactly what everyone else did. hidden time machine, normal, secured, public, empty directory, deleted share, created a new one 

 

every time the same error. its mounting the drive but error 45 in console. I can upload files to it, its not about write permissions

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