Apple Time Machine and Unraid 6.x updated setup instructions for MacOS High Sierra


Can0n

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Since installing unraid and replacing an older system I have been scouring the forums to find out how to get Apple TimeMachine working correctly with UnRAID. I have lots of issues with connecting to TimeMachine, errors in the back up or more recently that my Mac's keep telling me my backup disk has a new identity and needs to create a new backup, this taking about 24hours or so for the initial one and needing to redo it a few times a week is painful.

 

Well from some help via this forum and YouTube I found a working solution to this. Its most definitely using disk shares instead of user shares that's the key.

 

Here is how it got it working perfectly on my 2 Macs in my home.

First you really should dedicate a single disk for this purpose as we will be using Disk Shares not user shares.

 

Prep:

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For my purpose I set all shares to exclude disk8 (5TB) to dedicate for my two Mac's (a Mac Mini with 2x1TB SSD's and a Macbook Air with 256GB of SSD space)

 

  • I deleted my TimeMachine user share and made sure my disks shares were being exported on the Tower/Main screen. (v6.3.5) ---- Method of Procedure: with array stopped head to Settings-->Global Share Settings and make sure Enable Disk Shares is set to Yes, then start the array.

 

59f9665bd5095_GlobalShareSettings.png.be4e9c9dac71d1a2dc25279f695238e4.png

 

  • Next I had about 2.5TB on the Drive so used the docker contain Krusader and ssh via terminal to move the contents to the appropriate folders on other disks.

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Setup:

  • Once the disk was empty it was time to set Timemachine up. Head over to the Shares tab, click on the disk# you are going to use and not a share name

 

59f966f0ddda8_DiskShares.png.412ea44f8c51db4eb11a0cb87dec76ad.png

 

  • make sure Export is set to Yes (TimeMachine) and Security is Secure (TimeMachine wont backup to public shares/disks over a network)

 

59f9672d3d768_DiskSharesettings.png.b3ea9c7cc595eb649369fc0e3557c2ef.png

  • make sure to give your user read/write access
  • Mount the Disk on your Mac with cmd-K then use type afp://username:password@serverIP/disk# and connect (in my case is used disk8)

 

59f967a17df6c_MacMountingthedisk.png.5aa36883bf3a263ef327b79de5937623.png

 

On your Mac:

  • Open Preferences and TimeMachine
  • connect to the disk you just mounted it should also be detected if you didn't mount it but I always mount it to know i can access it.
  • Start a Backup once Timemachine accepts your disk and is scheduling a backup.

 

I found my backup started but failed after about 20min or so. but i noticed I have a new Usershare named after my computers name with the .sparsebundle attached

 

Resolving the Backup Error:

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  • Click on the new User Share with the .sparsebundle on its name.
  • Change the Allocation Method to High Water

 

59f969edd00ba_NewUserShare.png.bd4cc9025f18f27fd8ce4107c10fe7b2.png

 

  • I chose not to use the Cache drive as i only have 512GB and my initial backup was over 1TB but feel free to use it or turn it on after the initial backup completes.
  • under the Security Settings leave it all as default

 

59f96a683ad3f_NewUserSharesecurity.png.95808d4ca31487fa8373d09798beb13a.png

 

 

Thats It both my Mac's connect and backup without error now and I couldn't be happier

 

Disk Shares.png

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  • 1 month later...
  • 3 months later...

I have only used "User Shares" is it safe to add a new drive to my array, and only use that as a "Disk Share" for this purpose. I will go to all my other shares and make sure they exclude this new disk first.

 

i guess my question is... IS it safe to have both User Shares + 1 Disk Share active at the same time on the same unRAID Server?

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38 minutes ago, alfredo_2020 said:

I have only used "User Shares" is it safe to add a new drive to my array, and only use that as a "Disk Share" for this purpose. I will go to all my other shares and make sure they exclude this new disk first.

 

i guess my question is... IS it safe to have both User Shares + 1 Disk Share active at the same time on the same unRAID Server?

I would suggest setting this up as a time machine share and only including one disk in the share. But yes, you can share disks without a problem.

Edited by wgstarks
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  • 3 weeks later...

Hello I have heard this was started with support in unraid 6.5 and on MacOS high Sierra I have yet to try it yet

 

if I can find time tonight will see if I can get it going as I am finding issues with the hourly backup now it will get at least one successful back up a day the rest fail with a unsupported features error

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  • 2 months later...

For some reason, i always have a recurring issue with timemachine and unraid. After a reboot of unraid, TM can't find the disk anymore and you have to move heaven and earth to make TM finally use the correct disk, even with the setup described here.

 

Once that is done, and the first backup is done (i'm scheduling a backup once a week) in 9 out of 10 times TM keeps spinning up the unraid disk every 10 minutes or so. Driving me crazy. After a reboot that stops, but... most of the time TM lost it's disk again... and the whole sh*tty procedure starts over again... at the moment, i've rebooted the mac, and selected the unraid disk TM should use, it found it, but... it starts accessing it every 10 minutes... and i didn't even do a backup... i'm getting so tired of this. 

 

Any tips on how to set up TM once and for all?

Basically this setup here works, but how do i prevent TM from constantly spinning up the unraid disk every 10 minutes or so after the backup is finished?

Edited by jowi
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8 hours ago, jowi said:

how do i prevent TM from constantly spinning up the unraid disk every 10 minutes or so after the backup is finished?

 

Go to the settings page for your TM share, and set AFP Security Settings/Volume dbpath to a directory that will persist on your cache drive (assuming you have a cache drive).

TM constantly (well, every 10 minutes) checks info stored in some TM database files. If these are located on your array disk, the disk will spin up. By configuring the share as above, those files are actually stored on the cache drive. Not only does that prevent the array disk to spin up, the whole operation is also much faster.

In fact, I recommend you do the same for ALL your AFP shares as it greatly improves general file browsing performance (ever waited 5 minutes for a share directory listing to be displayed in Finder?) 

 

This is from the unRAID help for Volume dbpath:

Quote

Sets where to store netatalk database information. A directory with same name as the share will be created here.

Leave this field blank to have the database created in the root of the share.

 

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  • 4 months later...

Hi there

 

I had the same odysee as everyone here. Only problems with timemachine backups. Then I proceeded to the above steps and still had promleme to find the backups. Even after the first run. Now I additionally changed the timemachine shares to public and additionally set the volume dbpath to a directory on the cache disk. /Mnt/cache/apple-data The system has wrote some folders and files in there right now.

 

Now it seems to be working right. It is really boring this timemachine issue.

 

cracksilver

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  • 5 weeks later...
1 hour ago, eagle470 said:

Do I need to dedicate a disk

No. You can just create a share for your TM backups and let it use all your disks if that works better for you. Really depends on what limit you configure for the size of your share I think. If you limit the share to say 500GB there probably isn't a need to spread it across ten 8TB disks (you could though).

 

Your Mac will not reformat the disk space used. Probably the only major difference between this share and your others will be the sharing protocol (AFP rather than SMB).

 

Edit: Also, if you do decide to limit the TM share to just one disk you can still use that same disk for other shares.

Edited by wgstarks
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  • 1 month later...

So i upgraded to 6.6.6 and timemachine stopped working getting a PANIC error now... Any ideas why this would be?1058330561_ScreenShot2019-02-04at7_42_55PM.thumb.png.94e8f56c0176d29cf268be18bf1d8a9d.png

 

EDIT: I Manually Downgraded to 6.6.5 by replacing the 5 files that start with bz... on the flash drive, and my problem wasn't fixed. So something got corrupted when i upgraded to 6.6.7RC2 to see if the new kernel would fix my Vega Reset Issue (It didnt) So when i reverted to 6.6.6 i lost my 6.6.5 recovry through the gui, but i learned you can replace the 5 BZ files with the ones i download from unraid.

 

I will keep investigating this and might start my own thread.

Edited by alfredo_2020
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