SMB Apple Time Machine 6.7


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I little update for those who are trying to set this up. I downloaded CleanMyMac X and ran it on my macOS and for some reason it seem to help. I connect to the server by going to Go in the mac and the clicking on Connect to server. Once that is done i can go to time machine and select the server and wala it starts to back up. So if there is an app that is corrupted or a file it will not backup. Thanks to @wgstarks and @limetech

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With your tip about mapping the drive first - i too can now see my SMB drive in time machine - that was the key there!

 

Only problem i see now, is that I'm setting it to backup, and it doesn't seem to see the data that's on there, so i have to create a whole new backup which doesnt seem right

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39 minutes ago, rorton said:

With your tip about mapping the drive first - i too can now see my SMB drive in time machine - that was the key there!

 

Only problem i see now, is that I'm setting it to backup, and it doesn't seem to see the data that's on there, so i have to create a whole new backup which doesnt seem right

I would actually start a new backup to make sure that is not an issue. I myself deleted the whole directory and created a new one just name it TM and that’s it. Created a user for TM using the same name and left it like that. Send me a message if you need more help on setting this up. I might do a video to help people. 

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42 minutes ago, Tucubanito07 said:

I would actually start a new backup to make sure that is not an issue. I myself deleted the whole directory and created a new one just name it TM and that’s it. Created a user for TM using the same name and left it like that. Send me a message if you need more help on setting this up. I might do a video to help people. 

yeah, if i could help it, i didn't want to blow away the 3 years of backups i have on there, I've started it off, and it seems to have found it i think, has half hour left to run, so will report back later and let you know the status

 

Seems that TM only understand what's on the disk when it starts the backup, goes off to interrogate or something like that!

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1 hour ago, rorton said:

yeah, if i could help it, i didn't want to blow away the 3 years of backups i have on there, I've started it off, and it seems to have found it i think, has half hour left to run, so will report back later and let you know the status

 

Seems that TM only understand what's on the disk when it starts the backup, goes off to interrogate or something like that!

Hopefully it works for you. My computer is at work and is still backing up through OpenVPN. Hopefully when i get home it will finish. If it does then now i know that it was a corrupted file or program that was keeping it from backing up. @rorton

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hi, yep, it worked fine, and its now seen all the old data, so im really happy. 

 

I think for me, the bit i was missing is initially mapping then as share on the mac - i just opened time machine and expected it to appear - makes sense i guess, but after i mapped it, and the mac knew about it, it appeared, and worked as expected!

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8 minutes ago, rorton said:

hi, yep, it worked fine, and its now seen all the old data, so im really happy. 

 

I think for me, the bit i was missing is initially mapping then as share on the mac - i just opened time machine and expected it to appear - makes sense i guess, but after i mapped it, and the mac knew about it, it appeared, and worked as expected!

Yay awesome. Mine should finish when I get home tonight. I am glad I was able to at least point out what work for me and worked for someone else. 

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UPDATE: I was able to backup my Macbook Pro. See below on how I have it setup in case someone needs help to get theirs fix. Make sure you connect to the server before the backup shows up available under Time Machine. Click on Go and then go to Connect To Server. Once you have done that successfully you will see the name of the share come up and you can select it and walah. If it does not finish or it stops. It could be a corrupter file or program. What i used to resolve this issue was CleanMyMac X and it worked like a charm for me. If you know of any other software that works please post them for others to try. Hope the way i did it works for anyone else.

Screen Shot 2019-05-17 at 12.14.00 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-05-17 at 12.10.48 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-05-17 at 12.10.35 PM.png

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Not really related to Time Machine but I would recommend setting the "Hide "dot" files" to "yes". Otherwise you'll see the ".DS_Store" files that macOS likes to put all over the place. I used to compulsively delete them since my home is a mixed environment.  This option keeps me from feeling the need to do that.

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1 hour ago, Taddeusz said:

Not really related to Time Machine but I would recommend setting the "Hide "dot" files" to "yes". Otherwise you'll see the ".DS_Store" files that macOS likes to put all over the place. I used to compulsively delete them since my home is a mixed environment.  This option keeps me from feeling the need to do that.

You can stop macOS devices from creating those things:

https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/stop-ds-store-files-mac-network/

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Hey, i had similar issues with switching from afp to smb and i just registered to let you know how i solved it here.

 

First of all i've seen that the console app and the log inside there told me that authentication did fail.

So i went ahead and googled around and found this:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/246244

 

This states that maybe some "security.plist" is broken, so i went ahead and looked at that file which was completely broken here.

It was just a scramble of hex / asci mix and nowhere near valid xml. So i kept a copy and replaced it with the content from stack overflow
 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0"> 
  <dict> 
    <key>SecItemSynchronizable</key>
    <true/> 
  </dict> 
</plist>



This did not fix the issue but maybe together with the second step i took did:

I went to the time machine prefpane and removed the disk again.

Opened up a terminal and executed:

sudo  tmutil setdestination -ap smb://username@myserver/Backup



This asked me for my local user password and the remote destination password, since then its working here.
No changes were made to the smb conf files or extra confs and the setup is as all the screenshots here have shown.

 

Hope that may helps some of you.

Edited by ukkeman
better code highlighting
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  • 4 weeks later...

Something to add, from my own personal experience, which may help those of you who had issues locating the share.

 

Mac OS, when you browse your time machine share, will not normally authenticate, if your share is browseable.

So a way to force it to do it with a username is to connect to it via the "connect to server" window.

 

  1. Open Finder (any finder window is fine)
  2. use CMD+K hotkey (CMD is also known as apple key) to open the connect dialogue.
  3. Type in
    smb://yourusername@yourserver/sharename
      Example: smb://[email protected]/timemachine
    It is worth noting that OSX being a Unix-based OS does weird things with spaces in names, so I would recommend making your share name not have spaces in it, just to be safe.
  4. After telling it to connect, you will then be prompted for the password that goes along with that username. You may want to tell MacOS to add that password to your keychain.
  5. Make sure the share is writeable with that user; drag a random small file into the time machine share window. (This was one of my mistakes, my new user though configured to write was not able to). You can delete that file after, it's just a validation.

Now, you should be able to open up the Time Machine preference pane and your share will be visible as a backup source.

 

----

 

For those of you who got the share to recognize, but struggling to get your first backup to complete, consider excluding as many folders as you can avoid backing up, especially things you don't normally need to back up.  Open the Time Machine Preference pane, go to Options, and you can add folders to exclude. 

(n.b. Many folders may not be browse-able, but you can do a trick, open a finder window and then use CMD+shift+G to open a finder window to a given special or hidden folder, then drag the tiny folder icon from the top of that window into the exclude list.)

 

Here's some of the ones I exclude:

/var/vm   (contains your hibernation file and swap file)
~/Downloads
~/Library/Caches
~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker  (if you use Docker for Mac)
~/Library/Mail  (if you use Mail app, exclude this initially as it has hundreds of thousands of small files)

I would also recommend for your first backup, if they are -still- failing, to exclude anything else  you can easily exclude. Your music library, photo library, etc, anything with a large data size, just to get that first backup to succeed. You can then remove the excludes on those later, and those files will be added to subsequent backups. 

Edited by Crast
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On 6/18/2019 at 8:04 PM, Crast said:

Mac OS, when you browse your time machine share, will not normally authenticate, if your share is browseable.

So a way to force it to do it with a username is to connect to it via the "connect to server" window.

 

  1. Open Finder (any finder window is fine)
  2. use CMD+K hotkey (CMD is also known as apple key) to open the connect dialogue.
  3. Type in
    
    smb://yourusername@yourserver/sharename
      Example: smb://[email protected]/timemachine

Thanks for this tidbit @Crast. I was able get the Time Machine share to mount by disconnecting from all of my shares from within Finder and then connecting again with my user name and password. Although, Time Machine was now showing all of my shares even ones that weren't exported with the Time Machine flag. 😄

 

Now we'll see if the backup completes or not. 🤞

 

86 GB @ 5 hours seems writing directly to the array seems about right — right? 😆😅

 

**Update**

  • I am happy to report that Time Machine via Unraid has been working successfully at backing up and restoring. Kudos and thanks to the @limetech team! After seeing the topic threads on the forums, I have been waiting for this day to come.
  • Until next few generations of Unraid come, leaving an HDD attached and letting Time Machine intelligently backup between the two sources may not be such a bad idea.
Edited by Zer0Nin3r
Reporting back with positive findings
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On 6/20/2019 at 12:21 PM, Zer0Nin3r said:

Thanks for this tidbit @Crast.

86 GB @ 5 hours seems writing directly to the array seems about right — right? 😆😅

No probs, actually I have had a lot of experience with using and recovering time machine even before using unraid, using airport extremes and time capsules as well. I just translated some of the same tricks.

 

On 6/20/2019 at 12:21 PM, Zer0Nin3r said:

86 GB @ 5 hours seems writing directly to the array seems about right — right? 😆😅

Time Machine is very slow at handling lots of super-tiny files, which is unfortunate since OSX uses a lot of super-tiny files. The biggest culprits in my experience are your Mail folder if you use Apple Mail, but also your /Applications folder, as each app contains resources for every supported language, over a hundred languages * at least four resources in the case of Apple's own apps.

 

Apple Mail aside, your Applications folder doesn't change nearly as often, so after the initial backup, your backups should go much faster.

Other commonly changing files like Caches you should exclude (see the second half of my previous post)

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